The Rover

In writer/director David Michôd's feature debut, Animal Kingdom, a family of criminals underwent their own personal apocalypse. If that had an end-of-times feel, this impressive follow-up goes even further. A caption places the story in "Australia. Ten years after the collapse". It's a husk of a society, stripped of morality, with sun-bleached landscapes home to emotionally ravaged characters. There are no heroes or villains, only survivors. A seldom better Guy Pearce plays the suicidally determined protagonist. After his car is stolen, he teams up with the wounded brother of one of the thieves (Robert Pattinson, giving an excellent performance) to track it down. But why is the car so important? There are echoes of Mad Max and Cormac McCarthy's The Road in this beautifully shot dystopian western and, like Animal Kingdom, the film is excruciatingly intense and prone to explosions of violence. No matter how spare and uncompromising the approach, though, it still has the decency to offer a solution to its mystery.