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| Jude Turner starring in Emotion Is Dead/The Last Grind (2023) |
Over the last couple of years, several people have brought up Emotion Is Dead (2023) and suggested I watch it. It's a loose thriller plot wrapped around a conceptually more interesting look at de-industrialised Elizabeth and closure of the Holden automobile plant. The film opens with old television sets playing nostalgic Holden commercials and rosy educational films about Elizabeth before the city was gutted of industry. It then centers on a young man in the present played by Jude Turner working as a gardener who starts thieving from wealthy clients.
On the one hand, we have a valiant attempt to make an independent film that explores serious existential issues for many thousands of people. Social catastrophe comes in the wake of deindustrialisation and the film is quite aggressive in its position and sincere in its tribute to an ocean of people affected.
But on the other hand, the film is filled with a great degree of caricature where it could have used more naturalism. The protagonist's mother is uncannily written like that of Vincent Gallo's mother in the black comedy Buffalo '66 (1998). She is dressed in Holden-branded clothing and living past glories of Peter Brock car races like Vincent Gallo's Buffalo Bill's obsessed VHS watching mother played by Anjelica Huston. The problem is, Emotion Is Dead plays it straight and it comes off as immature cliche.
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Left: Gabby Llewelyn as "Shazza" in Emotion Is Dead/The Last Grind (2023). Right: Anjelica Huston in Buffalo '66 (1998). |
Sometimes artists use being born in a town as license of authenticity in regards to what they depict. But very little of Elizabeth's character, a city that has lots of it, is actually captured or depicted. Instead we get a cartoonish class consciousness, where an upper-crust university friend puts the protagonist through some demeaning hazing rituals. It's just ridiculous. Even the train journey is a lost opportunity to make an impression of the landscape or express the often atmospheric train cabin interiors. Elizabeth has many interesting vistas that catch the light and distinctive red soil that tip-toes to the desert. Much more attention to detail is spent capturing the leafy green Eastern suburbs where the lead actor does gardening work and arguably the film's sensibility lies.
Buffalo New York, the hometown that director Vincent Gallo sometimes claims to hate, is shown in more focus, familiarity and reverence than anything about the Northern Suburbs in Emotion. Look at all the scuffed surfaces of Recckio's Bowling Center in South Buffalo. Gallo buys Christina Ricci a heart shaped cookie, a regional Buffalo specialty from Dickie's Donuts. The local Denny's haunt evokes transience and Americana. People online mourn the loss of Caffé Lococo, which became iconic because of how Buffalo '66 presented its graphical signage. You can make big claims about being a local and use it as a selling point for your film's authenticity, but what is the purpose if you don't capture the area's character?
Another northern-born filmmaker who felt they had a golden ticket to depict these suburbs however they liked was Justin Kurzel. Snowtown (2011) on first release felt like a revelation. It had a high level of competence and a lot of skillful restraint in terms of naturalistic direction. But it's a film whose initial praise is now worth critical revision. In reality, its a film that depicts the lower-classes as entirely sub-human and takes the form of torture porn while dressed up as an art film. Ice cream vans with distorted chimes traveling across dilapidated expanses are hackneyed symbolism, naff comedic wide and suburban cliche.
In the case of Emotion, I just think director Pete Williams has been out of town too long. He's quite proudly a rootless cosmopolitan who left for London to study filmmaking, worked overseas in advertising and corporate media such as Amazon Prime, Disney Plus and doesn't speak like he's ever lived in Elizabeth at all. Although I think the central concept is great, which is to meditate on Holden car production vanishing from Australia despite being so embedded in our psyche, I just think its development was rushed and the thriller narrative desperately forced around it. Rather than being life finding a way through cracks of concrete, it felt a bit astro-turfed. The film does have transcendent moments, some of the skateboarding and camera movement around this action is effective.. Empty tree-lined streets become a canvas to sketch movement through. Skate wheels transform dormant factory floors into playgrounds. Sequences like this often give us respite from the emo soundtrack with a recurring traditional score by Max Tulyewski, which does marry well with Johanis Lyons-Reid's images. These sequences make us feel the breeze and the score creates a delicateness for such moments. |
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| Some of the skateboarding sequences in Emotion Is Dead/The Last Grind (2023) are quite transcendent and one of the visual strengths of the film. |
The pop-punk emo tracks used probably meant a lot to the director.. But I'm not sure how well they resonate for the audience. For me, It's like taking the worst of the tail-end of a genre, where it had become as emasculated as the hippies that punk originally came to depose and stripped it of much of its noise and texture.. All the while expecting me to feel pathos. I just don't think this music sub-genre stands the test of time. But the use of such material isn't as egregious as say The Hounds Of Love (2016) using Joy Division for its groan-inducing ending.. Director Pete Williams does at the very least use the music logically to evoke his youth. In that sense it is personal filmmaking.
The inter-cutting with archival footage and empty factories is memorable. If the film didn't push such a slapped together narrative around it, we could have had more of a poetic art film. But much of this intertwined historic material does serve the central concept well and validates the overall experience. The central character being a young man with no economic future is an important lightning rod and substantial core of the picture. An every-boy and cipher for the radicalised zoomer denied their birthright.
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don't have a real industry does require us to appreciate how a work is made in isolation. And we will have our own understanding of certain local particulars that an international audience would not. Even when aspects of a work misfire, it can still be a film of historical importance and Emotion does take history head-on. Being self-funded, Pete William's film is able to critique (in the abstract) government, unions and international finance's role in destroying the city of Elizabeth. Australian films tend to ignore all this and go straight to critiquing the mostly men who were put out of work by such deindustrialisation, depicting them as savage animals like in Snowtown (2011). So as cartoonish as Emotion is at times, at least Williams gives the victims of oligarchy their dignity rather than sticking the boot in. If you would like a taste you can Check out the trailer |
*********************************************** Mike Retter is a film director, of the indie feature Youth On The March, creator of the zine "Cinema Now", and the Podcast "Meat Bone Express", and part of the Port Film Co-op. This post was first published on Jan 27, 2026 on Bill Mousoulis's fabulous website PURE SHIT AUSTRALIA CINEMA © Mike Retter 2026 |
