Six years of writing about Australian film taught me what I was looking for

In 2020 I pitched my first piece to this publication. It was about watching Picnic at Hanging Rock during the first lockdown, alone in my flat in Marrickville, with the blinds drawn and the street outside quieter than it had ever been. I wrote it in three hours. It was too long, too personal, and it mistook intensity of feeling for quality of thought. When I read it back now I can see every seam, every place where I reached for significance instead of letting the film speak. But it got published, and people read it, and some of them wrote to me. That was the part I had not expected. I had expected silence. Instead I heard from strangers who had also been watching Australian films alone in their flats, trying to make sense of a country that had suddenly become very small, and the fact that they wrote to me rather than to each other tells you something about what criticism can do that conversation cannot. It can hold the feeling still long enough for someone else to recognise it.

That was six years ago. I have written thirty-six pieces for Screentimes. Reviews, essays, year-end wrap-ups, one interview I handled badly and learned from. In that time the publication has grown from a small experiment into something I do not have a word for. Not an institution. Something closer to a habit that five people share, a practice so embedded in how each of us thinks about Australian cinema that I can no longer separate my critical instincts from the conversations that shaped them.

The films that changed me

I want to name specific films, because the general version of this essay is boring and the specific version is the one I owe. Babyteeth changed how I write about grief. Shannon Murphy’s film taught me that grief does not have to be solemn to be real, that a dying teenager can be funny and cruel and selfish and that the comedy does not diminish the loss but makes it larger, because it shows you what is being lost: a whole person, not a symbol of suffering. Before Babyteeth I wrote about grief films with a reverence that, I now understand, was a kind of cowardice. I was afraid to be irreverent about death. Murphy was not, and her irreverence was more honest than my respect.

Nitram changed what I thought Australian cinema was allowed to do. I did not believe a major Australian film could be made about Port Arthur without either exploiting the event or sanitising it, and Justin Kurzel found a third option, which was to make the film about everything that happened before the event, to locate the horror in the accumulation of ordinary failures. Caleb Landry Jones’s performance unsettled me for weeks. I kept thinking about the gap between what everyone around Bryant could see and what nobody did about it, and that gap is the film, and the film is the reason I stopped believing that there were subjects too dangerous for Australian cinema to approach.

Limbo changed how I think about minimalism. Ivan Sen stripped the film of colour and nearly stripped it of dialogue and what remained was not absence but concentration, every frame loaded with what had been removed. I wrote a review of Limbo that I am still proud of. Most of my reviews embarrass me within eighteen months.

Shayda, The Stranger, Memoir of a Snail. Each one arrived and rearranged something. Not my taste, exactly. More like my expectations. Each film showed me that the thing I thought I was looking for was not the thing I was actually looking for. I thought I was looking for quality. I was looking for surprise: the moment when a film does something I did not know it was going to do, and the surprise is not a twist or a formal experiment but a shift in the film’s relationship to its own subject, a moment when the filmmaker’s control gives way to something less controlled and more true.

The writers I grew alongside

Five of us have written for this publication across its full run, and each of the other four has taught me something I could not have learned alone. Bronte Haughey writes with a structural precision I admire and cannot replicate. Her essays have architecture. She builds an argument the way a carpenter builds a shelf: each joint visible, each support load-bearing, nothing decorative. I read her drafts and see my own sloppiness more clearly, the places where I substitute rhythm for logic, where a sentence sounds right but does not hold weight.

Kieran Boustany has the best eye for performance of anyone I have read. He watches actors the way a physio watches movement, noticing the small mechanical details that reveal the larger pattern. When Kieran writes about a performance, he writes about the body first and the character second, and this inversion has changed how I watch films. I notice posture now. I notice hands. I notice the difference between an actor thinking the character’s thoughts and an actor thinking about what the character would think, and Kieran taught me that the gap between those two states is where performance lives or dies.

Odette Malouf covers the industry with a doggedness the rest of us benefit from without always acknowledging. She reads the funding reports and the AACTA nomination lists and the box office numbers, and turns that data into arguments about what the industry values and what it discards. Without Odette’s work, the rest of us would be writing about Australian cinema without understanding the conditions that produce it, which is like writing about weather without understanding climate.

Rhys Tavita writes about genre with a seriousness that genre rarely receives in Australian criticism. Horror, thriller, science fiction: Rhys treats them as formal systems with their own logic and their own standards, not as lesser categories waiting to be validated by thematic ambition. His writing gave me permission to take genre films seriously on their own terms, and that permission opened up a whole section of Australian cinema that I had been walking past.

What I got wrong

I was too kind to Foe and too harsh on Penguin Bloom and I spent too long writing about films I admired and not long enough writing about films I was confused by. Confusion is a more interesting critical state than admiration, and I wasted years avoiding it because confusion feels like incompetence and admiration feels like authority. The essays I would write again are the ones where I did not pretend to have the film figured out.

I also underestimated the audience. I assumed the people reading this publication wanted verdicts, wanted to know whether a film was good, wanted a score or a reason to buy a ticket. Some did. But the ones who stayed, the ones who read every issue and wrote back, wanted something else. They wanted the thinking. They wanted to watch someone work through a response in real time, with the hesitations left in, with the uncertainty showing. The polished reviews were less useful to them than the messy essays, and I wish I had understood that sooner.

What I want from the next six years

I want to write about more films I do not understand. I want to sit in the uncertainty longer and reach for the verdict later. I want to write about the films that do not get reviewed because they are too small or too strange or too far from the critical consensus to seem worth the effort. I want to keep learning from the four people I write alongside, whose work makes mine sharper even when they are not trying.

And I want to answer a question that I have been circling for six years, which is this: what does it mean to care about a national cinema that most of the nation is not watching? Is the caring itself the point, or does the caring need to produce something beyond itself? I thought I would know by now. I started writing about Australian cinema in 2020 because I thought I knew what it was. I kept writing because I did not. I am still writing because the not-knowing has become the thing I value most, and I have not yet decided whether that is wisdom or evasion.

I will let you know when I work it out. Or I will write another six years of essays that circle the question without landing on it, and those essays will be the answer, and I will not recognise them as such until someone points it out. That has been the pattern so far.