Several times the hermit pushes Dan away, but you know this isn’t going to stick because you can feel the film bringing them together. Their relationship is fractious and their friendship hard-earned. In the middle of nowhere, he bumps into Weaving’s slobbering fiend, who tells him to bugger off because “this is my forest”. Circumstances around the death cause Dan great guilt and anguish, so he acts on a desire all of us have had at some point in our lives: he runs off into the woods and says arrivederci to civilised society. In an early scene, Dan tenderly cups the dead man’s face with his hands and gets in close, pressing his nose against the corpse’s. Winter’s production does include a dead body: one of Dan’s childhood friends. I’m not sure whether that rather idiosyncratic picture (from the directors of Everything Everywhere All at Once) ruined my appetite for off-the-grid films about men bonding, or whether it renewed my appreciation of ones that don’t follow its lead (no corpses, no boners). The latter’s grubby look and sheer hermitness reminded me of Paul Dano in Swiss Army Man, the so-called “boner corpse movie” starring Daniel Radcliffe as the corpse and Dano as a filthy outcast who lugs it around. The film’s core dynamic works in contrasts, pairing Phoenix Raei’s sullen cop Dan with a violently loud recluse played by Hugo Weaving. ![]() Actor turned film-maker Mark Leonard Winter gives it a noble crack in his directorial debut The Rooster, a bumpy outdoorsy drama about two broken men – a cop and a hermit – connecting and potentially healing through the deployment of pensive stares and introspective dialogue, performed in Australian bush settings. ![]() So many artists attempt to tickle our funny bones while hitting us where it hurts, and so many come up short. I tend to wince whenever I hear a film introduced as a blend of comedy and tragedy – not because it’s a bad combination, but because it’s one of the hardest to get right.
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