Australia, 1880. A small town lives in fear, and it is Arthur Burns who leaves his cave only to rob, rape and kill. To appease the townspeople, Captain Stanley takes his two brothers hostage and proposes to the middle brother Charles to find and destroy Arthur, for which he promises to release the youngest from prison.
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The sense of heat in a godforsaken hellhole, in a branch of a provincial Australian hellhole, haunts the viewer from the very first shots. But serious people solve their problems with a cool head, without any emotion or sentiment. If a man is made an offer he cannot refuse, he builds the world according to perfect algebraic schemes, and there is plenty of time – the whole nine days. But it still does not help, because in the equation “to execute cannot be pardoned”, with the obligatory comma after the first word, there are too many unknowns – “native/foreign”, “evil/good” “right/wrong”, “betrayal/faithfulness”. And in the world of half-animal-half-human banal logic of school mathematics does not work.
Indifferent cruel world of tightly twisted Gordian knots, lousy checks and rights based on force does not accept it. The world of the semi-wild, the feral, and the utterly savage. People, once cultured and noble, suffer and go wild in front of their eyes from the collision with the elements, savages who live in harmony with nature, suffer from the “benefits” of civilization. It’s almost like in Golding’s “Lord of the Flies,” when decent English kids get to the island – and all the cultural hullabaloo is blown off them in an instant. Only in “The Proposal,” the children trapped on a foreign island are replaced by adults, who over the years of colonization have become more and more cruel and uncompromising from generation to generation. Such is the game of survival, to break the course of which you can only die the hell out. Where even the last alcoholic reads “The Origin of Species” and the cultivated savage goes barefoot into the desert. These are the equations that Charles Burns, the hero of Guy Pearce, solves as a young hunted wolf, gaining more and more universal emptiness in his soul with every mile across the desert. And that is why he is the most tragic character of the film, slowed down and self-absorbed, like the hero of Jarmusch’s “Dead Man,” except that he carried his own death inside him, while Burns carries someone else’s. He is the horseman of the Apocalypse, a living time bomb with a clockwork mechanism that if it goes off, all living things die. And he doesn’t know how to deal with his bastard, wolf family, in which if there is anyone worthy of love or at least sympathy, it is the weak-willed wolf brother, not because he is good, no, but because he has an excuse – he does not know what he is doing.
And how to deal with the others in this bizarre world? Where scum with their hands up to their elbows in blood know what love is, even with a bullet in their belly go to watch the last sunset of their lives and die with poems on their lips? Where the police captain (Ray Winston), who looks like a ragged bear, every day on his way to work leaves all his good-naturedness and nobility at home, because to live with wolves is to howl like a wolf, otherwise they will eat him? Where his white and fluffy wife (Emily Watson), only one day disobeys her husband, put on a black mourning dress and go to demand a bloody massacre, and watch until nausea and faintness.
It’s just that everyone has their own boundary in their heart, separating them from the wild, primal hell around them, of which they are a part. It’s just a question of how far you can push it back. And Charlie Burns, with his smart, tired, wolf’s eyes, will realize that there is no good and evil in this world in its purest form, everything is decided on halftones, but the most important thing is the balance of forces: civilization and savagery, human, superhuman and nonhuman in everyone’s mind. That is why he will make a decision, the only reward for which will be looks full of reproach. It’s just that when the balance of nature is disturbed and all attempts to solve this problem by civilized, ethical methods end up wrapping you in the British flag – the sanitarians of the forest come into play. And not because they are good, not because they are heroes, and not because they respect the law – their actions are beyond human ethics. It is just that most civilized people do not understand what wolves understand, which, in order to escape, chew off their trapped paws – a simple in logic, but difficult in execution of the stoic principle “because it is necessary.
Info Blu-ray
Video
Codec: HEVC / H.265 (88.6 Mb/s)
Resolution: Native 4K (2160p)
HDR: Dolby Vision, HDR10
Aspect ratio: 2.40:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
Audio
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English: Dolby Digital 5.1
English: LPCM 2.0
English: DTS 2.0
Subtitles
English SDH.
