Movies
Arclight Travels Down ‘Mystery Road’ With Hugo Weaving & Ryan Kwanten
if reports on a new thriller filming in the central Queensland town of Winton in Australia.
Ivan Sen directed Mystery Road, which stars Aaron Pedersen (Bad Karma) as detective Jay Swan who returns home to an outback town to solve the murder of a teenage Indigenous girl, whose body is found under the trucking route highway out of town. The film also stars Hugo Weaving (The Wolfman, The Matrix, Captain America: The First Avenger, V for Vendetta), Jack Thompson (Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark), Ryan Kwanten (pictured; “True Blood,” Dead Silence, Knights of Badassdom), Tony Barry, Tasma Walton, Damian Walshe-Howling, David Field, Robert Mammone and newcomers Trisha Whitton and Siobhan Binge.
Sen, who penned the script, has taken on multiple duties including director, cinematographer and editor. The film re-unites him with producer David Jowsey following their collaborations on Toomelah and Dreamland.
Mystery Road will be released in Australia by Management of Doubt, a new local distributor, while international sales will be handled by Arclight.
The trailer for Ti West’s upcoming adaptation of A Christmas Carol raised a lot of eyebrows when it dropped earlier this week. While plenty of folks initially dismissed Ebenezer as a derivative project meant to cash in on the recent wave of unnecessary prequels that expand the backstory of beloved characters (such as 2023’s Wonka), Charles Dickens’ original novel already made a point of exploring Ebenezer Scrooge’s origins in detail – meaning that this new film is likely just a particularly faithful adaptation of the source material under a different name.
Couple that with the fact that the movie is being helmed by a genuine horror auteur and I think it’s safe to say that the latest iteration of the first modern ghost story is in good hands.
That being said, one detail that immediately jumped out at me during the brief teaser (other than a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod to Johnny Depp’s iconic bedroom death scene from the original A Nightmare on Elm Street) is the fact that many of Ebenezer’s ghosts appear to have been directly lifted from the iconic John Leech illustrations that accompanied the first edition of Dickens’ novel.
Here are a couple of stills from the trailer compared to the original artwork:
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
The Phantoms in ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Ebenezer’
Marley’s Ghost in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
Mainly working with old-school wood and steel engravings that would later be transferred to print, Leech was instrumental in crafting the iconic look of history’s most influential phantoms – especially since Dickens is said to have been deeply involved with the creation of these so-called “comic illustrations.”
And since the novel is commonly said to have popularized spiritualism in Victorian England, much of the ghostly iconography that we still see in genre media to this very day (including some of Ti West’s previous films) can be traced back to the author’s partnership with Leech.
Ebenezer won’t be the first A Christmas Carol adaptation to borrow heavily from these designs, but I can appreciate how Ti West is incorporating an important part of horror history into his latest film.
Ebenezer will be available in theaters starting November 13.
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