The Brooklyn Rail

The world’s supply of the silver-white gemstone opal is almost entirely mined from the state of South Australia; sprawling opal fields occupy great swaths of Australian outback, the largest being Coober Pedy, where Ivan Sen’s Limbo (2023) was filmed. Coober Pedy, originally kupa-piti in the Indigenous language of the region, has a few translations which usually amount to: a white man’s hole in the ground. This town becomes Limbo in the film, both a literal and figurative wasteland, and any refracted opalescence is turned gray through the prism of Sen’s black-and-white cinematography. Excavation serves as a seemingly endless, mindless, careless activity; a thing to do, an occupation of time. In the hands of the Aboriginal Australians who still live there, gemstones—having once been pillaged by white men—remain scarce; so, too, does the truth.

Simon Baker is unrecognizable and understated as Travis Hurley, the roughly sketched archetype of a classic anti-hero: a chain-smoking, drug-addicted police officer sent to reopen a cold case where a young Aboriginal woman, Charlotte Hayes, went missing twenty years earlier. Hurley creeps into town driving a dusty nondescript sedan, arriving at his sparse hotel room carved out of sandstone—a common phenomenon in Coober Pedy known as dugouts, which provide protection from harsh elements. It’s an element of the landscape which Sen emphasizes, despite the simplicity of the visual metaphor; this is a place where things stay hidden, underground and out of sight. A cavernous gulf soon stretches wide between Hurley’s aimless investigation and the estranged members of the Hayes family, who round out the film’s small cast of characters. Hurley first questions Charlotte’s brother Charlie (Rob Collins), an alcoholic underachiever who spends his days depressed, digging for opals, and living out of a trailer steps away from the entrance of a seemingly abandoned mine. Soon Hurley learns, if not from Charlie directly then from his refusal to cooperate, about the miscarriage of justice which occurred twenty years earlier, allowing the mystery to remain unsolved—it’s less of a sudden revelation and more of a foregone conclusion. Charlie was assumed to be the perpetrator and subjected to racist interrogations, while the police neglected to find another potential suspect.

The tension in Limbo has since dissipated into a low, simmering burn, and Hurley’s presence as a white police officer is regarded with requisite hostility by the locals. This includes Charlotte’s sister Emma (Natasha Wanganeen) and her children, who he approaches while they scour mounds of dirt on their hands and knees, searching for signs of opal stones. While Emma remains suspicious, her daughters take interest and ask where Hurley is from; he answers by pointing to the sky and saying, “up there.” He recognizes—and is frequently reminded of—his own position as outsider, a spaceman meandering across the lunar landscape of Limbo, usually only occupying the outer edges of the frame. Sen tends to stay away from close-ups, preferring instead to shoot wide, with characters moving in and out of view.

Limbo is almost entirely Ivan Sen’s one-man show. The Australian auteur wrote, directed, cast, colored, and edited the film on his own, an exercise in either restraint or resistance against basic elements of film language. Electric shades of the Australian Outback—rusted red rangelands, the wide expanse of blue sky—are exchanged for shades of gray; or white, when the sun is highest in the sky; or black, at night, or when Hurley ventures deep underground in search of evidence, a jaded Orpheus at the end of his rope. Sen’s editing approach is similarly unobtrusive, with shots lingering, sweltering with the stillness of the image. The subtleties of Baker’s performance—a flinch, a squint, a smirk, a shift in weight—are emphasized with such pared back pacing. Though Sen is also credited with the film’s music composition, the score is sparse; natural sound permeates. The effect is a cultivated aesthetic of absence: this world, now stripped bare, has been abandoned, and Sen is more interested in examining the damage that an absence of justice renders upon a fractured community, rather than any sense of cathartic resolution for the audience.

The rough shape of the film’s genre makes it one of Sen’s most accessible for an American art house audience, with his previous work characterized by a more playful transgression across formal style. Sen explores the Western with Mystery Road (2013) and Goldstone (2016); cyberpunk science fiction in Loveland (or Expired, 2022). Limbo is far from a typical neo-noir, as the film is stylishly marketed. The clash between Indigenous culture and oppressive colonial presence suggests something closer to a South Australian gothic, a more apt successor to True Detective’s first season than any other subsequent series. Religion provides an unlikely throughline for the film, contrasting an absence of traditional Aboriginal belief. The first voice we hear comes from Hurley’s radio as he first drives into Limbo, a man’s voice—we can assume from his cadence that he's a preacher—discussing “the importance of patience, perseverance, and faith in God.” The only place of worship we see is a Catholic church carved into the landscape, a neon cross hovering above the entrance and a few white parishioners seated in the claustrophobic pews. Rurality offers the film its isolated atmosphere, a landscape haunted by memories etched into the dry desert soil.

At the film’s outset, as the opening credits play, a pair of disembodied hands paint wide, swirling patterns of dots on soft canvas; later, while Hurley is having dinner with Emma, it is revealed that Charlotte once practiced this style of painting, hoping to one day study art. About five-hundred miles north of Coober Pedy, in the small town of Papunya, a group of Aboriginal artists formed the Papunya Tula Artists collective in 1972, still practicing this same tradition. Here, as was characteristic with Aboriginal artwork in the region, dots were used to create great abstract designs, which had been previously devalued by a colonial pressure towards Aboriginal Australian assimilation. The intricate language of these concentric circles and rounded shapes holds meaning only for those who understand how to read such storytelling gestures, often representing a folkloric narrative passed from generation to generation. Sen underscores the unlikely survival of these stories; in offering resolution only for the fragmented Hayes family members who reunite at the end of Limbo, he pays tribute to the resilience of community.