Road Train (2010) - 2/4

Road Kill is actually the title for non-Aussies. Road Train, or Royd Troyn if we want to transcribe accurately, is the Australian title. A royd troyn, for those of us not in-the-know, is what Americans call a 'semi' and the British call a 'lorry.' But you're also welcome to use 'big rig,' 'Mack truck,' 'transport', and just 'big effin' truck!'. There's a little more to the royd troyn, howehvah. It has not just one but multiple rectangles hooked to the back of it, not unlike a train. Hum.

Road Kill does have to do with a big truck. As in so many other films, like Duel (1971) and Joy Ride (2001), it has to do with a big truck terrorizing the bajeezus out of some road wimps. For better or worse, the writer of Road Kill decides to do something different with the road-terror movie. To wit, the film takes the road-terror movie and turns it into a magic-realist existential journey. Arguably, all road-terror movies are existential journeys. But this one knows it is. I'm not saying it knows what it's doing. I'm just saying the filmmakers were trying to make allegory here.

Just what does the big truck do? It finds and terrorizes two college-aged Australian couples, of course. One of those couples is having sex and the other isn't. The couple that isn't having sex isn't having sex because the female part of the couple decided to also have sex with the male part of the couple that is having sex. Can't blame the male part of the couple that isn't having sex for not wanting to have sex with the slut who screwed his best friend. But he has bigger fish to fry, because of that big truck I should get back to. The big truck finds these mildly unpleasant flakes and runs 'em off the road. When they go to investigate the truck, they find it empty and steal it. Or is it stealing their souls?

As they drive away, they all fall asleep. The presumptuous truck drives them off the road to the edge of a cliff and lets them simmer for a while. They yell at each other a lot, which I think Australians do in any situation good or bad, and ultimately decide to split up. Here the psychology of everyone in the group is perverted while the imagery of Cerberus is superimposed over the truck. Is the truck a vampiric denizen of hell leading these banal young adults to the end they deserve, with a sort of Antonionian sense of contempt for bored and empty lives, or are they all just suffering from sunstroke, dehydration, and infection? Decide for yourself.

Road Kill works a lot better if you imagine most of what happens as a hallucinatory nightmare of sunstroke than as a genuine magic realist mechanism without explanation. Otherwise, you're bound to view these youths as under assault by pure allegory, and in doing so you'll find yourself suffering the same fate. Either way, however, the prime joys of the film are in the explorations of the mechanism of the truck and, I suppose it's implied, the mechanism of fate. My favourite moment is when a character reaches into the guts of the truck seat and pulls out a key, resembling something from a Cronenberg nightmare. While the truck gradually grows more interesting, the character interactions grow increasingly tedious as their psychoses leave no real trace of their original personalities, and thus is evaporated what little character development and dramatic tension between them there was. Watch for the truck.