Australia  –  Drama  –  Year: 2015  –  Running time: 96 mins
Language: English

Synopsis:

Christian (Paul Schneider) returns to his hometown to attend his father’s (Jeffrey Rush) impending wedding to a much younger woman. There’s an icy atmosphere between father and son, but Christian enjoys a fond reunion with childhood friends. As the wedding nears, old secrets threaten a seismic shift in all their lives. The film is a radical adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s ‘The Wild Duck’.

moody and intense story with powerhouse performances from Ewen Leslie, Geoffrey Rush, Miranda Otto, Sam Neill and newcomer Odessa Young.
Wenlei Ma (news.com.au)

Director: Simon Stone
Writer: Henrik Ibsen (play), Simon Stone (screenplay)
Cast:
Sam Neill           …  Walter
Geoffrey Rush   …  Henry
Anna Torv          …  Anna
Miranda Otto      … Charlotte
(for full cast, and more information, see “The Daughter” in IMDB)

CFC Film notes:

Deeply involving and emotionally searing, “The Daughter” represents a confident and profoundly moving big screen debut for established theatre director Simon Stone.  Those familiar with Henrik Ibsen’s play (which Stone freely adapted for the Sydney stage in 2011, and The Barbican, London in 2014), will find its themes of the haunted past detonating in the present and the gulfs in class and gender fully intact.  Yet Stone’s radical retooling of the story details, characters and setting has yielded something urgent and new, and the low-key, naturalistic approach to his direction of a fine cast — a rare tonal quality in contemporary Australian drama — should ensure busy international festival play and the rapt attention of distributors seeking quality fare.

“Odessa Young is outstanding as the unfortunate Hedvig”: Irish Independent

In an unnamed, present-day logging town that has seen better times, Henry Neilson (Geoffrey Rush), a well-to-do mill owner who’s aloof to the point of arrogance, announces to his employees that the economy has forced him to close.  Among their number is long-time labourer Oliver Finch (Ewen Leslie), a gregarious and devoted type who assures his schoolteacher wife, Charlotte (Miranda Otto), and teenage daughter, Hedvig (Odessa Young), that everything will be OK.  Oliver’s absent-minded father, Walter (Sam Neill), who used to be partners with Henry and served jail time for an unspecified fiduciary breach, is unconcerned.

Meanwhile, in preparation for his marriage to much younger former housekeeper Anna (Anna Torv), Henry has summoned his estranged son, Christian (Paul Schneider), from America to serve as his best man.  Currently on the wagon and separated from his wife, Christian regards his father with a smouldering resentment that gradually comes into focus as he reconnects with childhood chum Oliver and, in the process, learns that Charlotte used to be in his father’s household employ (Christian’s mother committed suicide around this time).  The inevitable revelation of a long-suppressed family secret, and Christian’s fundamentally profound misunderstanding of it, lead to a cataclysmic shift in family dynamics, tempered by a faint ray of hope.

Stone has said that when he sat down to write the screenplay he had neither Ibsen’s text nor his own theatrical adaption on his desk or in his mind.  What he clearly did retain, however, is both his innate understanding of the playwright’s original aims and a keen sense of small-town class tensions.  But, in an obvious nod to the melodramatic trappings Stone resolutely avoids, Walter wearily advises his son, “Everyone’s got a story like this, Oliver, it’s as old as the hills.”

An actor himself (“Jindabyne,” “Balibo”), Stone has drawn extraordinary work from his cast across the board.  With special nods to the work of Leslie and Schneider, it is Young’s sexually precocious yet fundamentally well-raised Hedvig (the only character name retained from Ibsen), with her lightly dyed purple hair, open smile and love of a duck crippled by a blast from Henry’s shotgun, who leaves the greatest impression.  That this is a feature-film debut suggests new offers are now being entertained.

Technically, the film is at once traditional and subversive, with Andrew Commis’ lush widescreen photography massaged by an audacious and successful editing strategy that finds Stone and cutter Veronika Jenet subtly time-shifting visuals and dialogue within the same scene and using brief absences of sound to speak louder than words and actions.

Eddie Cockrell: ‘Variety’, Aug 2015,  for the Sydney Film Festival (ed.Bob Foale)

Selected UK reviews:

The Guardian (Luke Buckmaster)
Little White Lies (Josh Slater-Williams)