My quick rating – 4.7/10. “Things were different when I was a girl. Before the fires came and washed all the green away.” And that’s how Cruel Hands lets us know we’re in Australia. Nothing says “welcome to the Aussie horror/thriller experience” quite like a kid giving us some ominous bushfire exposition before his family disappears into the wilderness.
Maria (Mavournee Hazel) and her 12-year-old son, Dai (Diesel La Torraca), have fled their violent husband/father, Jason (Josh McConville), and taken refuge in an abandoned farmhouse while bushfires rage across the region. Emergency services are struggling to find them, Jason is very much not interested in letting them remain missing, and Maria is trying to build something resembling a safe life for her son.
It doesn’t take long to figure out that the farmhouse isn’t the only thing Maria is hiding from. Flashbacks gradually fill in the blanks about the family’s life before they went on the run, and Dad’s preferred explanation for everything is that Mom’s mental health is the problem. Because apparently “my wife is suffering under years of abuse” is less convenient than “she’s crazy.”
The movie takes its time getting anywhere, though. Cruel Hands is slow. Like, “maybe this abandoned farmhouse came with a complimentary calendar because we’re going to be here for a while” slow. But once the pieces start falling into place, there’s a genuinely grim story underneath all that patience.
There is one particular decision that had me questioning Maria’s parenting credentials. She chooses to hide a dead body rather than report it. On paper, that sounds like one of those moments where you yell at the screen, “Are you fuckin’ serious?” And yet, the more I thought about it, the less ridiculous it seemed. She’s terrified, isolated, dealing with an abusive husband, surrounded by bushfires, and trying to protect her kid. Add in the Australian gun laws and the general panic of survival, and suddenly making a catastrophically bad decision feels pretty damn human.
That’s one of the things Cruel Hands gets right. The situation isn’t silly. It’s ugly and uncomfortable, and the characters don’t always make the sensible choice because people trapped in horrific circumstances generally aren’t operating with a fully charged brain and a helpful decision tree.
Unfortunately, the acting occasionally works against that realism. There are moments where performances don’t quite match the emotional weight of the scene, and it can pull you out of the movie. Thankfully, it isn’t constant enough to completely derail things.
What does work is the feeling that this story is personal. Cruel Hands is not about the bushfires, the farm house, or even about the increasingly risky situation that Maria is put through. In reality, it is a tragic exploration of the internal battle that two damaged individuals fight as a result of their destructive relationship, which renders them unable to act like parents.
Writer/director Al Kalyk brings uncomfortable realism to that dynamic that makes me wonder if there’s some personal experience informing it. I’m not saying there is. I’m saying the movie understands the ugliness of that situation really well.
Cruel Hands isn’t a bad movie. It just takes a long-ass time to become the movie it wants to be. The performances can be shaky. The pacing is glacial. And some of the character decisions will have you wondering if everyone collectively left their common sense in the burning bush.
Beneath it all, however, lies a dark yet strangely realistic tale of abuse, trauma, and survival, in which an innocent child finds himself sandwiched between two adults who are entirely incapable of protecting him from their own destruction.
