Long Weekend

A couple whose marriage has collapsed go camping on a remote Australian beach to repair things. On the way and at the camp they treat nature carelessly: shooting animals, leaving rubbish, cutting a tree, smashing an egg. The environment slowly begins to answer back. Colin Eggleston directed, from a screenplay by Everett De Roche. There is no monster. The threat is ants, birds, a dugong and the wind; the fear comes not from a creature but from nature in total. That structure gives the film a particular place in the Australian genre wave of the seventies. The landscape is not beautiful but menacing, and the wide shots keep shrinking the characters. The couple's fights are the other half of the story. The tension between them is shown as the source of the violence they direct at the world around them. Sound design is its most powerful instrument; nothing happens on screen while the sound carries the threat. It later became a cult item and was remade in 2008. Who it is for: viewers who like nature horror and slowly built tension. Who it is not for: anyone unable to watch animals harmed; the film shows it plainly.