Limbo: Spare Aussie Noir Captures a History of Racial Inequity

By Liz Braun

Rating: A

The setting is the story in Limbo, a terrific Australian noir outing steeped in shame.

Shot in black and white and directed by Ivan Sen, Limbo is the story of an old, unsolved murder and the weatherbeaten cop (Simon Baker) who turns up to investigate. As Travis Hurley, Baker is all tattoos and defeat, a white junkie cop hoping to turn up new evidence in the 20-year-old disappearance of Charlotte Hayes, an aboriginal girl.

The backwater mining town of Limbo, where the crime took place, is a speck in a huge and colourless rural landscape that looks like the surface of the moon. Limbo itself is dotted with abandoned industrial structures, cave-like houses and buildings cut out of the rock. It’s desolation central.

The filmmaker has said that the wrecked landscape that is pitted by mining shafts (Coober Pedy in real life) is as damaged as the people who live there.

Slow, grim, and generally soaked in dread and discomfort, Limbo begins with a stand-off of sorts as Hurley attempts to talk to the dead girl’s brother, Charlie (Rob Collins) and her sister, Emma (Natasha Wanganeen).

Nobody wants to talk to him. Nobody is particularly happy to see a white cop coming in to have a second look all these years after Charlotte’s vanishing, as it’s obvious local police never took much of a first look when the crime was committed.

Charlotte’s disappearance, according to her family, was ignored at first. It took two weeks for the police to act, and then all they did was lean on local aboriginal men and members of Charlotte’s family with accusations.

It took a year before police looked at a white guy in town whose bad behaviour with local aboriginal women was well known. On top of everything else, the guy told someone he’d killed a person. Pity the police did nothing until it was too late.

Hurley finds a family torn apart by the events of the past, none of which can stay in the past. One character references young men killing themselves and another dying in prison; when Hurley asks the dead woman’s young nephew — born long after the murder — if he’s ever heard people say anything about Charlotte, the kid responds, “I’m sick of people talking about it.”

Initially alienated, Hurley slowly begins to get to know the family members of the dead woman in the course of his investigation. That tentative human bond is enough to change everything.

What Hurley discovers in Limbo is not so much about the crime but about the racial inequity that has dictated every facet of life. The film is an indictment of law enforcement as it operates (or doesn’t) for aboriginal people.

The true irony in Limbo is that everyone in town knows who Charlotte’s killer probably is. He’s alleged to be dead, having suffered from dementia; some form of forgetting seems to afflict the whole country when it comes to certain chapters in its history.

Writer-director Sen, who is Indigenous Australian, is also the composer, cinematographer, and editor of Limbo which played at TIFF 2023.

Limbo. Written and directed by Ivan Sen. Starring Simon Baker, Rob Collins and Natasha Wanganeen. On digital release May 21.