The body is a battlefield in Miranda Nation’s Undertow

There’s lots of blood and corpses in Miranda Nation’s debut feature Undertow, but it’s not a slasher movie. There are lots of naked bodies, but it’s not a sexploitation film. There are plenty of footy players, but it’s not about sport.

So what, exactly, is Undertow?

“It definitely has psychological thriller tropes – the subjective telling, the unreliable narrator, the ambiguity around whether what she’s seeing is real or not,” says Nation, an actress-turned writer-director with a string of acclaimed shorts to her name.

Laura Gordon stars as Claire and Olivia DeJonge is Angie in Miranda Nation’s feature debut Undertow. Credit:Bonnie Elliott

While it’s the loss of a child that forms the psychological and emotional core of the film – Nation drew on her own experience for that aspect of the story (happily, she now has two children of her own) – the drama derives from a sex scandal at the footy club that has left Angie, who is still at high school, pregnant.

There are echoes of real-life sports sex scandals about this, including the infamous St Kilda schoolgirl drama of 2011 and another involving North Melbourne players, as well as the earlier “roasting” scandal in English soccer. But, says Nation, “it wasn’t supposed to be representing any one specific situation, it was kind of an amalgam of different stories and the research I’d done into those accounts”.

The real point of difference, though, was in making the female experience the focus of the story.

“There aren’t many stories out there that address miscarriage and abortion without apologising at the end,” observes DeJonge, the 21-year-old Perth-raised actor who will jet back to the US to film the second season of The Society for Netflix as soon as she’s finished playing Priscilla Presley in Baz Luhrman’s Elvis biopic. “It’s not something men can relate to automatically – they have to sit with it, think about it and process it a bit more before it resonates. Whereas with women, you’re seeing yourself on screen.”

Laura Gordon, Miranda Nation and Olivia DeJonge spearhead the female-dominated filmmaking team behind the film.Credit:Simon Schluter

“Putting a stillbirth at the centre of the story is not something that’s happened a lot,” adds Gordon. “A lot of women talk about these stillbirths they had 20 or 30 years ago and they were literally told to just suck it up and move on and they’ve carried it with them for years and years. It’s only because the internet gives a platform now for women to share their stories, to name their children and commemorate them, in a way that allows the grieving process to take its due course.

“That’s sort of the jumping-off point for our story, but it’s a fairly universal look at grief, it doesn’t have to be ‘you had a baby that died’. If you’re not willing to go into that grief, if you try to suppress it, it’s going to come out in ways you can’t control.”

Without revealing too much about the plot, it’s fair to say that Claire’s interest in Angie becomes unhealthy for both of them – not to mention the people around them.

But Undertow never quite becomes the sort of film it might have in different hands and, perhaps, in a different time. It teeters on the precipice of the sort of psychosexual thriller the 1990s produced in spades – think Pacific Drive or The Hand That Rocks the Cradle – without ever quite going there.

That makes it a more interesting film, though undoubtedly also a less readily marketable one. And even its director is unsure if resisting the lure of making a more obvious psychological thriller in that way was the right move or not.

“Through development we had a lot of pressure to push it into the genre space because drama is a dirty word. Everyone wants genre,” says Nation, with remarkable candour. “So it did kind of veer towards genre but that’s not my natural space, so I’m grappling with what it actually is in the finished project. I’m still not sure what works and what doesn’t.”

Gordon, though, sees that tension as a positive. “I like that it shied away from that [the more overt genre aspect]. It teases around the edges but then takes a turn to the left. I was drawn to that.”

For Gordon, so much of the strength of Undertow comes from the fact that the point of view is Claire’s – and it’s a perspective that can’t be entirely trusted.

“Post-natal psychosis is a thing,” she says. “I thought she ended up in a place where she was having hallucinations and seeing things that aren’t there. She becomes aware of that and she’s trying to edit it but at a certain point she tips over into a zone where she’s no longer aware that the things she’s seeing aren’t real.”

The story of sex scandal involving footy players, a schoolgirl and a pregnancy has plenty of echoes in real life. Credit:Narelle Portanier

As a result of the trauma she has suffered but has yet to process, adds Nation, “she’s more attuned to that whole primal life cycle. But at the same time she’s blinding herself to certain aspects of what’s happening in Angie’s situation”.

“It’s an obsession that’s bundled up in the fact she [Angie] is pregnant, and she feels some sort of connection to that child, like it’s her job to take care of that child,” adds Gordon. “But because of her tunnel vision she doesn’t see that this young woman has suffered trauma and needs help too.”

Undertow will be released nationally on March 5. Director Miranda Nation and actor Laura Gordon will attend Q&A screenings at The Ritz in Sydney on Thursday, February 27 at 7pm, The Dendy Canberra on Saturday, February 29 at 7pm, and at the Kino in Melbourne on Thursday, March 5 at 7pm.

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