Trigger Warnings: Mentions of disability & abuse of disabled people

Let me preface this review with one fact: I knew next to nothing about this movie before watching it. Looking through the Fantastic Film Festival screenings list, my eyes jumped to a young Ben Mendelsohn in a car, skimmed the synopsis of the film and the details of a QnA screening with director Geoffrey Wright (which I did not end up attending) and decided “Yeah sure! Let’s go with this.” I didn’t know any of the director’s past work, I didn’t know who else starred in it, I didn’t even know there would be satanic worship involved until an hour before I watched it! I just thought it would be a slick racing thriller with Mendelsohn at the leading wheel. For better or worse, this is not that movie.

Wright’s 1994 Metal Skin is instead about four broken Melburnian youth in Altona, and their gradual decline into the world of cars, black magic and obsession. The actual lead is Joe (played by Aden Young), a teenager stuck caring for his brain-damaged father while dreaming of girls and muscle cars; a role model filled by Dazey (Mendelsohn), womaniser, car driver, and a generally slick sleazebag who cheats on his girlfriend Roslyn (Nadine Garner). These three are tied together by coworker and Satanic worshipper Savina (Tara Morice), who lusts for Dazey’s attention while Joe desperately falls for her.

Before we get back to the characters in this drama, I want to discuss arguably one of the best aspects of the film—the atmosphere. The set design perfectly encapsulates the grime and despair filling the city streets of Melbourne, and says a lot about the kind of world these characters live in. A dimly lit packing station of a busy department store swept up in plastic sheets and peanuts. Dirty junkyards coloured with string lights and festival tents. Even Joe’s family home, filled with fancy European architecture and design once lauded, now dilapidated and beyond repair. Despite such urban and grounded locations, the film gives them an almost fantastical quality in its staging. Which certainly helps when it starts going into Savina’s satanic rituals: some of those sets are downright terrifying.

It also helps that the editing and direction for this movie can be kind of, for lack of a better word, insane sometimes. According to those who attended the QnA screening with Wright, he described the structure of the film through the ‘block theory of time’—essentially the idea that everything can occur simultaneously but we as an audience interpret it in a linear fashion. Thinking back on the film, it’s clear this concept became integral to editing major scenes, with lots of sharp cuts to different locations and settings in the middle of ongoing scene progression, or even just abrupt cuts to different takes of the same shot. It’s certainly jarring at first, especially during the workplace scenes, but I actually really appreciated this stylistic choice (especially in representing the characters’ thoughts or plots parallel to the current scene). It was great to see this extend to some unusual moments of cinematography as well, though perhaps not as exciting to see today as it would’ve been back then.

That said, all of this came from a perspective of having never seen any of Wright’s other works, and especially not Romper Stomper, his sophomore hit about Nazi skinheads at war with Chinese immigrants. What I mean by this is that I didn’t know how Wright likes to write his characters—completely and utterly unapproachable. But while I’m sure that works well in a story about Nazis (which, even from the plot synopsis, suggests an internal conflict on their own ideologies throughout the film), I don’t think this approach works as well for a character drama about blue collar teenagers. Our protagonist Joe is an incel, lusting for any woman who shows a head turn his way. Then soon after being introduced, is shown to physically abuse his disabled father for embarrassing him in public. I should clarify that I don’t care whether the film shows strong morals or not. Half the film centres on Satanic worship after all. Wright does give explanations for Joe’s actions anyway, relating to his family’s immigration to Melbourne, and his desire to escape Altona to get rich off car engines. However, all of that feels crammed into a couple of scenes towards the climax of the film, and with not much else to him before (besides social ineptitude and wanting to drive cool cars) there’s little for us to get attached to before his inevitable downward spiral later in the film.

It’s a shame too, because Dazey, Savina and Roslyn get some really interesting character progression, especially with Dazey’s shift from suave womaniser to blubbering mess. Unfortunately, despite so much time spent on their love triangle in the middle chunk, their plots somehow feel disconnected from the main ‘Joe’ plot of the film. Hell, despite opening the film and being a major influence on the other three leads, Garner’s character is practically pushed side stage for most of the film until Wright remembers she’s in the screenplay! It doesn’t help that the pacing was so slow towards the middle—all the energy from the first half hour kind of fades and you’re left thinking how long is left in here, only to find you’ve still got an hour left.

I think this is the most gross I have ever felt during and after a film. On a technical level, it has a lot of interesting ideas and visual techniques, with a tantalisingly greasy atmosphere. However, I also felt that grease in its characters, and unfortunately I don’t think it was always in the most compelling way. As someone who usually likes this kind of grossness in character writing, I think this missed a step somewhere, but I’m sure that its unique style and energy might still gravitate towards someone else.