Terror Nullius (Soda_Jerk, 2018)

Any halfway decent critic should admit when he or she is out of their depth, and the truth is I am painfully unqualified to even scratch the surface of Terror Nullius, the astonishingly dense, politically scathing found-footage featurette by the Australian duo who call themselves Soda_Jerk. It would probably take a degree in Australian Studies to fully comprehend the historical and filmic references on display here. Barring that, you're want to have seen every Mad Max film, read everything by Patrick White, somehow gotten ahold of every episode of "Skippy the Bush Kangaroo," and gone on a lengthy walkabout with David Gulpilil.

Soda_Jerk are the sibling team of Dan and Dominique Angeloro. (The Guardian UK has a very solid take on them and Terror Nullius.) What they've done here is to draw from the entire historical compendium of Australian recorded media to produce a kind of counter-narrative bush Western, in which women and minorities undo the colonial history of the nation by force. The first act alone sees Mel Gibson isolated as a potent symbol of everything wrong with Australia, and white patriarchy more generally, and proceeds to kick the shit out of him. But it doesn't stop there.

In the film's central set piece, Skippy and his human companion lead a leftist revolt against White Australia and its exploitation of both the Aboriginals and their natural resources. Rabid killer kangaroos encircle a group of capitalist shills and begin eating them whole. Only one man is allowed to live, a reporter (I think) sporting a button defending Aboriginal land rights against expropriation by uranium companies. The kangaroo in question looks skeptical, but gives this likely Labour voter a pass...this time.

Although the references to Aussie Cinema are too numerous to pick up on first viewing, even for a specialist, there are a few key touchstones. The Mad Max movies set a dominant tone of violent reclamation of the "wasteland" of the Australian desert, But particularly central to Terror Nullius is Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock. As Skippy mentions ruefully, the disappearance of four little white girls has become a foundational myth for the nation, whereas the erasure of 40,000 years' worth of indigenous life and culture is hardly worth considering.

Too often, art based in remix and appropriation is in love with its own cleverness. While there's definitely some humor in Terror Nullius, it is by turns angry and mournful. It explores how a nation and a continent imbibes fabricated myth and memory, establishing its own innocence in the process. Pull back the curtain, and it's a horror show all the way down.