User Reviews

During a camping trip, Thomas' young daughter Lucy is killed by a logging truck in a hit and run accident. While the driver Luke (Daniel Henshall, from Snowtown, etc) serves time in prison, the grieving Thomas (former rugby star turned actor Matt Nable, from Underbelly, etc) leaves behind his old life. He gets a job as a logger, and awaits the release of Luke. When Luke comes back to work in the forest, Thomas works with him. And every day he holds Luke's life in his hands while he works amongst the tall timber. But what should have been a tense psychological drama about two damaged men bound by tragedy becomes rather muted and dramatically inert. Nable and Henshall offer a marked contrast - Nable is quiet and introspective and his performance is largely internal with long stretches of silence, while Henshall is more aggressive and volatile. This is a low key, slow burn drama which explores themes of grief, love and loss and vengeance and redemption. We wait to see how Thomas will avenge the death of his daughter, but there is a distinct lack of tension in their shared scenes though. Fell marks the feature length debut of director Kasimir Burgess, a veteran of short films and music videos, and writer Natasha Pincus, whose oblique script slowly teases out details rather than spoon feeding the audience. But there is not enough narrative drive to sustain the film over 90 minutes, and this would probably have been more successful and a lot tighter as a shorter feature. Nonetheless, Fell is visually beautiful to look at thanks to the gorgeous cinematography of Marden Dean (The Infinite Man, etc), who gives us some poetic imagery and dream sequences, and makes the forest itself almost another character in the film. Burgess' direction is stylistic and there are many moments of self indulgence here. He also uses the ambient sounds of the forest as a sound scape and backdrop for the drama. Fell lacks commercial prospects and will not appeal to mainstream audiences beyond the festival circuit.