X (MA). Director: Jon Hewitt. Starring: Viva Bianca, Hanna Mangan Lawrence, Stephen Phillips, Eamon Farren, Peter Docker. 85 minutes
A late night taxi hoons along a Sydney street. Its passengers have witnessed a murder, and fled. One, Shay (Lawrence), is a teenage hooker, in the midst of her first hellish night on the job. The other is a high-class call girl whose retirement plans have been disrupted by the night's violent turn.
As Holly (Bianca) stares through the window at the anxious, shadowy shopfronts blurring past outside, she sees the metre-high scrawl of a single word in a store window: RUN. Moments later, just as the wisdom of this ominous sign is sinking in, it is reinforced by a second, further along the street: NOW.
By this stage of the new Australian film X, we've already seen plenty of it s sordid face. Now we get a sense of its numinous depths: this succinct message of warning seems telegraphed to Holly from some place far removed from her ordinary reality. It becomes clear that there are mystical dimensions to this 'erotic thriller' that allow it to transcend such generic labelling.
Which is not to say X's human realities are not also profound. From the outset it pointedly contrasts its two central characters, who are prototypes of the sex industry. Shay has entered it from a place of desperation; from an abusive stepfather and a junkie mother who has recently died, into the clutches of predatory men, in the hope she can eke out a more bearable living on the street.
Holly, on the other hand, has lived a glamourous lifestyle, funded by her services to wealthy clientele over the course of a decade. She knows the dehumanising nature of her work, but she has luxurious dreams and has seen her career to date as a means to an end. She has accumulated her own small fortune and, when we first meet her, she is on the brink of retiring to a new life in Paris.
The film portrays the events leading up to Holly's accidental encounter with Shay, and to the murder of one of her clients by a crooked cop called Bennett (Phillips). It then follows the two women's flight (and fight) for the their lives among the drug-sex-and-violence-addled witching hours of Sydney's seedier bars and backstreets. It is thrilling, and at times both graphic and gratuitous.
But X returns to that sense of something beyond