Sean Parker
During one of the many film festivals I covered last year, a production still of a young First Nations Australian girl with long black hair and piercing white eyes standing in front of a curtain became one of the most haunting, artistic images ever to sear itself onto my brain. It’s a photograph that’s hard to keep looking at. A young girl with seemingly no emotional presence, producing a modicum of fear, and simultaneously an abundant desire to help her. It’s an almost paradoxical image out of context, not knowing this young girl’s history or her story, and yet assuming something is wrong. That something must be done to make this little girl’s life better. I saw that image again last week when I was offered to review Jon Bell’s The Moogai, the film from which it originated. I didn’t anticipate how it had been speaking to me, luring me in, and haunting me, long before I ever saw the film.
The Moogai begins in 1970, at the tail end of a jaw-dropping era of racial discrimination targeting the Indigenous culture of Australia. For over sixty years, between 1910 and into the 1970s, the government, in conjunction with church organizations and welfare groups, forcibly removed children from their First Nations parents, forcing the children into white homes with the hope of erasing their cultural heritage and, as the movie puts it, “breed out” their color over time. In a quick bit of exposition, we witness a pair of bible thumping missionaries attempt to abscond with the children from one of these First Nations villages, before chasing a young girl into a cave that neither man feels brave enough to walk into. Here, in the dark, The Moogai awakens.
What is a Moogai? The story quietly defines it as a regional boogeyman, but writer-director Jon Bell dresses that reductive characterization up for us. Propelling the film ahead fifty-plus years, we’re introduced to Sarah (Shari Sebbens) and her husband Fergus (Meyne Wyatt) on the cusp of welcoming their second child into the world. The two seem happy, and Sarah’s crushing it at work, leading into her maternity leave with serious consideration for a meteoric rise within her law firm. However, things change suddenly when Sarah goes into labor earlier than expected, as complications arise. Having her heart stop during the delivery process, Sarah is touched by The Moogai on the other side. Just as it awakened when a child entered its cave in the Australian outback years ago, it senses Sarah’s newborn and has plans to take him too.
Bell stirs a pot of supernatural monsterdom alivened by the psychological elements of postpartum depression and a whole heap of generational trauma. An obvious metaphor for the country’s years of kidnapping children from their parents, The Moogai creature is effective, especially when it’s kept in the shadows. The director’s vision and the editor’s task viciously align when the beast comes forth; later, it delivers frights when fully revealed on screen, which isn’t always the case for new age creature features.
Sebbens gives an intense performance as the woman at the center of Bell’s story, mired in the midst of a cultural eradication she has no memory of, which portends The Moogai’s awakening. Sarah thinks she has the perfect life. Though she occasionally engages and gives rides to her birth mother Ruth (Tessa Rose), Sarah has no intentions of engaging with or patronizing Ruth’s spiritual affectations, or adopting any of her heritage’s customs, for that matter. Through the gaze of this tale, it’s almost as if Sarah is possessed by modernity, and closed to developing a deeper relationship with Ruth.
This mother-daughter relationship is a big piece of The Moogai puzzle, especially as Sarah’s daughter begins to sense that her mother is forgetting her in the wake of the new baby’s arrival. Though the film sets an off-ramp for new generational trauma, it never pursues it. Instead, it drives Sarah to the brink of madness, crafting auditory noises and the appearance of ghost children while crediting it all to lack of sleep and postpartum psychosis. That eventually leads to a contentious scene where her co-worker/friend Becky (Bella Heathcote) throws Sarah under the bus when a teacher inquires about the alcohol on her breath. Suddenly, the woman who was all put together with the perfect life at the start of the film is finding her sanity questioned, and seeing the racially motivated micro-aggressions that she may never have noticed before.
That scene also contains an unexpected moment that caught me so off-guard I had to catch my jaw as it dropped to the floor. Way to throw a new parent’s worst fear into a movie filled with parental distress. It’s not Coffee Table level horrific, but it won’t be forgotten anytime soon.
With Sarah’s sanity in question, Bell’s script comes to a crossroads. He can either stay low-budget horror and drift more into the psychological aspects, or he can go high-concept and unveil his monster. I almost cheered when Bell declared the latter road the better one. The Moogai is a tale about culture and tradition, but even more so, it’s about the Stolen Generation and everything they’ve lost. So, to see a powder-white monster hurtle toward Sarah’s children is hugely metaphoric of the undeniable horrors wrought against the First Nations people, and to see it being fought off with Indigenous knowledge and customs is truly inspiring.
Last week, I reviewed the vampire film Daydreamers and compared a few surface-level aspects to the blockbuster hit Sinners. I mainly focused on the obvious vampire connection in both films, but there aren’t many others. Audiences looking for the deeper, more affecting aspects of Ryan Coogler’s film, such as the cultural appropriation and disenfranchisement of an entire race while contained in a similar monster movie experience, look no further than The Moogai. Though it may not have had Sinners’ budget, The Moogai is a rollicking independent monster movie with a strong story that endures a history Australia probably wishes never happened. And, as we’re learning better than ever stateside, history f*cking matters.
The Moogai is a fresh and haunting import, though I think Bell could occasionally draw more drama and horror by dwelling in the subtextual current a little longer. Many of Sarah’s relationships never get the benefit of added depth, even if Bell does a great job attending to the pace. At eighty-six minutes, The Moogai never loses focus and feels extremely tight. Ain’t an ounce of fat here. However, while I do feel as though the film could have benefited from a little more of a character arc between Sarah and Ruth, I think leaving you wanting more is something that the best horror titles know how to do well.
That brings me back to the start of my review.
The Moogai is now playing in select theaters and is available to buy or rent on PVOD.
THE MOOGAI | Official Trailer HD
THE MOOGAI is in theaters and on digital May 9!
