When a group of Indigenous activists attempt to repatriate ancestral artifacts found in a cave on Australia's Kangaroo Island, one of them is shot, evading police and taken to a local hospital, where the doctor attending to her experiences strange visions relating to violent events from the past.
远古熟睡
AustraliaM
Australia
The Dreaming is certainly a very interesting film. It very much reminds me of The Beyond in terms of form and content, as here we have a plot revolving around the resurgence of evil in a place that was home to a tragedy. Its all underpinned by surreal imagery and dream logic. The film begins with the discovery of an Aboriginal burial ground on an island, which then leads to the death of a young Aboriginal girl and ultimately involves the girl's doctor when she begins suffering nightmarish visions. The plot moves at what is best described as a slow simmer. There isn't a great deal of narrative and not much is explained, which seems to have a turned a…
Australian folk-horror swimming in that 80's fried atmosphere that follows a doctor falling down a rabbit hole after the death of her mother and simultaneous death of an indigenous activist in her care.
A mysterious burn on her wrist draws her into the ancient lore of The Dreaming, so she goes after her archeologist father to a sacred island for answers.
Starts off really strong with a dark tone, moody style, and li'l splashes of supernatural FX. The theme of colonialism gives this some major substance as well, with the ancient lore leading to these characters becoming haunted in both dreams and reality by genocidal fishermen. Dark stuff.
I was 100% on board but I found as it flip-flopped between…
Australian supernatural / folk horror / mystery. An archeological dig within a cave reveals aboriginal artefacts, bearing tragic ties to a terrible invasion / slaughter by a group of vicious whalers - including a bracelet belonging to a murdered Aboriginal woman. 9 months later, some of the artefacts are stolen from a museum by a group of aboriginal youths. Following an altercation with the museum’s security, one of the youths (the bearer of the bracelet) dies in the hands of a doctor. The doctor soon begins to endure nightmarish visions - linked with an ancient Aboriginal practice known as ‘The Dreaming’. A stylish, slow burn, trippy, enigmatic, moody, atmospheric and fairly disorientating piece. Very evocative of Carpenter’s ‘The Fog’, with…
1988, Australian, dated
The Aboriginal woman's X-rays on the illuminator didn't show anything out of the ordinary. As I kept looking for any clue as to what made her go unconscious. Right before my eyes, the x-ray of her skull began to animate, swiveling and posturing side to side. Tilting backwards the neck reeled to its stopping point. An unrelenting tension forces the neck and head backwards. Persisting til SNAP!
Seems somebody in Australia saw The Fog and decided to combine it with The Last Wave.
A History of Violence
"You [white] people won't even leave our dead alone."
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas name checked this in Kier-la Janisse's WOODLANDS DARK AND DAYS BEWITCHED, saying something like it (maybe accidentally?) draws a parallel between the violence of white colonials against the aboriginal population and more general violence against women (I'm probably mischaracterizing her quote, please forgive me). I'd say it's pretty clear the filmmakers are concerned with the violation of sacred sites and the plundering of heirlooms and relics (a pretty on the nose confrontation between a professor who studies aboriginal artifacts and an aboriginal youth leaves little room for doubt its at least on their minds. "It belongs in a museum." "It belongs to us!").
One such…
Man, the All the Haunts Be Ours set is really a mixed bag so far. I've seen a couple of great ones but some of them are middling duds like this. It starts out well enough, setting up a mystery full of the supernatural and some intense atmosphere, but then it kinda goes nowhere. It's just set on repeat. The entire film is a series of sudden encounters between the leading lady and a ghostly gang of whalers. She never knows when they will pop up, but when they do, nothing new ever happens. They chase her. Whoopee. There's not even any real mystery. We know from the very start that an Aboriginal tribe is attacked and a girl is…
Aussie horror has an archeologist finding aboriginal artifacts in a cave on a small island and releasing something evil, causing his daughter to see strange things, all having something to do with a group of raping and pillaging whalers 150 years earlier.
The Dreaming looks and sounds good but suffers a little for being a bit too, uh, dreamy. It focuses just a little too much on the strange hallucinations that the leading lady starts to suffer from and while they are handsomely mounted, you get the feeling that this would have been much more fun if it had been more staightforward horror. Not a bad watch in any way, just a little more underwhelming than I would have liked.
Hooptober 7.0 #3
Flawed 80s Ozploitation riffs on The Fog, The Shining and Don't Look Now but with none of the chills. Some effective moments (peaks early with a frightening x-ray scene) and, as a whole, the film is beautifully shot, but none of the characters, themes or the mood are memorable. Tries to say something about colonial legacies but confusion over what's causing the supernatural incursions ultimately make this an exercise in frustration.
All The Haunts Be Ours Disc Six
Where does desecration end and archaeology begin?
I’m not rightly certain how historically accurate hockey Vikings are, nor late 80s Australian archaeologists with fireman mustaches. I don’t even know how one would search Osprey Publications for a visual confirmation of either, so I’m going to take the film’s word for both. This is basically a very Australian version of John Carpenter’s The Fog, and there’s nothing really wrong with that.
The cast are all solid in their roles, though some of the relationships are a bit contrived. Daddy Archaeologist uncovers a weird native bracelet that gets stolen by a girl who ends up in the emergency room staffed by Doctor Daughter, so they…
Eerie and atmospheric. Needles its way into the ways in which white brutality upon Aboriginal tribes leads to lifelong hauntings. The horrors inflicted remain a wound that can’t fully heal because every time it finally starts to scab over, a new generation of white people come forward to pick at it, discrediting the trauma of the people, stealing their historic artifacts, desecrating their sacred lands. These ideas come forward through jarring, mostly well-executed, dreamlike horror sequences that I found to be quite a treat.
Wish the film leaned into the perspective of the Aboriginal people rather than keeping them on the fringes in favor of a white protagonist. Even in a film about how damaging white civilization has been to Aboriginal groups, we still end up with a white person as a narrative guide.
The Dreaming seems to be a mostly forgotten piece of Australian historical horror, which is a great shame, as it tackles some of the darker elements of our country’s past head on. It sees a young doctor plagued by haunting visions, which coincide with an archeological uncovering on a nearby island and the death of a young Aboriginal woman. The film doesn’t spell its message out for its audience, but it’s a powerful one nonetheless — the human cost associated with the acts of our forefathers is immense, and not only is the debt yet to be paid for the immeasurable damage, but crimes against our fellow man still continue to be committed, to our shame. Comparisons to John Carpenter’s…
