In the Winter Dark

Spectres of the past and present haunt this chilly, enigmatic vision of isolated life in the Australian outback. Farming couple Horace and Ida (Barrett and Blethyn) live out their barren years in an uneasy, unspoken truce over a lost young daughter, their only distant company now a neighbouring grizzled retiree and a newly single mother-to-be. The bloody visitations of an unknown predatory animal bring the four together spatially - and send them flying apart. The bleak, pregnant ambience is handled effectively, but there's a mute hysteria at the heart of the marriage, which is hardly clarified by a confusion of flashbacks. It's hard to follow a narrator who's gone barking mad. (From a novel by Tim Winton.