THE ROOSTER
Written and directed by Mark Leonard Winter
101 minutes, rated MA
Selected cinemas
Reviewed by JAKE WILSON
★★

The first 15 minutes of The Rooster spark more confusion than anticipation, but they do suggest first-time writer-director Mark Leonard Winter – better-known as an actor in Australian film and TV – has a bent for the surreal. We open with an ominous tableau: a cop (Phoenix Raei) parked at night by the side of the road, a man hanging from a bare tree above him, and a naked woman (Isabelle Dupre) who wanders out of the darkness, clutching the rooster of the title.

Then it appears the whole thing was a dream, and we follow Dan, the cop, as he goes about his business in waking hours: feeding the chooks on his rural property, driving to work through the bush listening to Bach, and dealing with a disturbed childhood friend (Rhys Mitchell) who exposes himself outside a school, confirming the film’s twin preoccupations with poultry and nudity (quick, what’s another word for rooster?).

Briefly, we’re led to wonder if all this was also a dream, until the friend turns up in a shallow bush grave, an apparent suicide. Blamed for not having done more to intervene, Dan gazes mournfully through a rain-streaked window at the fields surrounding the portable police station, while an off-camera choir wordlessly laments his plight.

It’s a long way round the barn to reach a traditional buddy movie, in which two blokes from different walks of life gradually realise they’re about the same. Shell shocked by one loss after another, the solitary, mild-mannered Dan ventures further into the bush, where he meets his spirit animal in the form of a rambunctious old-timer (Hugo Weaving) identified in the credits as the Hermit, drinking and smoking himself to death in a makeshift shack.

With his bristly beard and colourful vocabulary, the Hermit is outwardly rough as guts, but also a sensitive soul with a store of earthy wisdom – a magical derro, as it were. Weaving’s growling, gesticulating, larger-than-life performance suggests he might be at home on stage in a revival of A Stretch of the Imagination, one of many earlier vehicles for this durable Australian myth.

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When the two cross paths, Dan is still nominally in investigator mode, hoping to clear up some nagging uncertainties about his friend’s death. But soon he drops any trace of a cop’s demeanour and moves in with the Hermit for a spell (how long isn’t entirely clear – but practical questions about any of this evidently aren’t what we’re meant to dwell on).

Assorted bonding activities ensue, of the kind sometimes termed “homosocial” – which is to say frankly intimate, but premised on the understanding that each man is straight as a die. Naked table-tennis figures significantly, as do ritualised urination and confessional monologues, typically filmed with the actors isolated in close-up and edited to indicate the characters are unable to meet each other’s gaze.