Simon Baker brings up the past in the atmospheric 'Limbo'

Outback Noir receives an Antonioni-style existential refresher in writer-director Ivan Sen's arid, melancholic mystery “Limbo,” a story of the missing and what is always present in a place of absolute beauty and profound racial injustice. Come for the cold case, stay for a pair of remarkably vivid performances from Simon Baker and Natasha Wanganeen. But understand that the real spell here is Sen's multi-hyphenated monochrome cinematography, which captures a desolate South Australian town as if it were a lunar landscape, light years from the comforts of Earth.

Sen's dusty, socially conscious crime saga, adjacent to “Bad Day at Black Rock,” has already generated solid returns with his previous films, “Mystery Road” and “Goldstone,” each of which starred Aaron Pedersen as an indigenous detective snooping around. rural communities full of corruption and secrets. (Sen himself is of indigenous and European descent.) “Limbo” is also based on a man searching for answers, in this case about the disappearance of a 20-year-old indigenous schoolgirl in the titular town, a remote and depressed opal mining town. advanced. This time, however, our taciturn visiting researcher is white, though no less affected by the lingering pains of a harsh land.

Travis (an unrecognizably worn Baker) has arrived in Limbo and its patchwork of wasteland mounds, open caves, and sparse businesses to see if the girl's probable murder, never officially solved, is worth reopening. The fact that this stoic, tight-lipped man listens to Christian sermons on the radio, but quickly becomes enthusiastic once he enters his motel room, tells us that there are other demons on his mind than the ones he might be unearthing.

What he initially finds is a reluctance to participate on the part of the missing Charlotte's surviving relatives. Her stepbrother Charlie (Rob Collins) lives alone in a trailer, usually moody and often drunk, and is still angry about the racial harassment he received from white police officers who were barely investigating at the time. Charlotte's older sister, Emma (Wanganeen), is separated from Charlie but is raising her two children, as well as her own daughter. They live off their meager waitressing salaries and everything they earn searching for opals in the countless piles of rocks.

Even Travis' search for the man everyone accepted as the prime suspect, a rowdy white local once famous for plying local teenage girls with alcohol and drugs, seems futile: Travis finds out from the man's reclusive brother. guy (Nicholas Hope) who had died the year before. New information rises to the surface as Travis tracks down clues, but it's as if traveling to the middle of nowhere to unravel a crime reveals a wasteland of dislocation and pain, the result of years of wrongdoing. Even a deepening bond with Emma, ​​one that provokes marked details of her past and playful teasing from her children, is approached cautiously, with Baker and Wanganeen offering a master class in how to minimize the synchronization. This extracted land may be full of holes but also, we sense, of emotional mines.

“Limbo,” which Sen also composed and edited, is ostensibly a murder mystery, complete with clues and, though played obliquely, a solution both stinging and believable. The narrative invariably feels like a mere framework for Sen's carefully cultivated black-and-white mood, immersing us in a barren, colorless world of loss, anger, and concealment. With only a handful of characters populating this freewheeling story, led by the compassionate melancholy of Baker's cowboy and the hardened loneliness of Wanganeen, “Limbo” is as much a last-chance western as it is a crime story.

There is no truer visual metaphor for this than Sen's astute choice of the city to interpret his fictional Limbo: the real-life Australian settlement Coober Pedy, where most homes and businesses are underground, built directly into the sandstone of the region, as if the times of the caves had returned. It is clearly a measure to avoid the heat. But for a noir of isolation and concealment, about how the past can often seem inescapable, these dark refuges (Travis's motel, a church, and a character's solitary lair) are an atmospheric motherlode.