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Yes, it’s an extraordinarily brutal movie, but evil is brutal. We want to avert our eyes, but we live in a time when evil, which always exists, has crawled out from under a rock and is right in front of us. There are those who don’t believe that people are purely evil, but they are among us. People who have no conscience. Who don’t consider other humans to actually be people, but rather things to be used or disposed of as they wish.
On the surface it is a story of revenge. Clare, an Irish convict in Tasmania in 1825, undergoes a horrific act of brutality by a British officer and two of his compatriots. She sets out to track that officer and the others down on a journey through the Tasmanian wilderness with the aid of a native tracker, Billy. This is based on the history of Tasmania — during the Black War, which was ethnic cleansing.
The journey is full of conflict and we see the differences between a person with a conscience and one without. We also see the various types of personalities, in the form of the sergeant and others who will allow themselves to be debased and humiliated but will still serve an evil person That is something we see daily here in this country as men and women do and say terrible things in the service of an evil person all in the hopes of advancing their own careers, making money, out of fear, or…
