Life, death, God: The small film tackling the biggest questions

To say that Kangaroo Island is a personal film is an almighty understatement.

Written by Canadian-born Sally Gifford and directed by her Australian husband Timothy David (aka Tim Piper), it is set on the titular island off the coast of South Australia, where they own a holiday house and where David has been going for beach holidays for decades.

The plot revolves around an Australian actor called Lou (Rebecca Breeds) who is forced to accept that her shot at the big time in LA may have passed her by, and who reluctantly returns to the family home on the island. And given that Gifford spent years as a struggling actor in LA (she met her husband while waiting tables in a steakhouse “and I got his order wrong”, she admits), is it fair – if a little rude – to surmise that this, too, is personal?

“I’m sure I was drawing on my own experience,” she says. “But I think I just liked the contrast between Hollywood fictionalised drama versus Kangaroo Island and the real-life drama she was experiencing.”

That drama centres on family dynamics. Lou is a party-hard creature who turns up on the island with a massive hangover and no luggage – the spur for a wonderful long-running gag – and is instantly at loggerheads with her Bible-bashing sister Freya (Adelaide Clemens).

A gradually unfurling backstory reveals a tortured past involving handsome surfer and university lecturer Ben (Joel Jackson), while the present-day tale focuses on the efforts of father Rory (Erik Thomson) to establish what will happen with his magnificent beachside property once he’s gone – which may be sooner than anyone anticipated.

It’s potentially heavy stuff, but handled with a deftness of touch and perfectly judged comedy that is utterly impressive given this is the debut feature of both Gifford and David, a veteran of the New York advertising world.

Gifford makes zero apologies for wanting to tackle the biggest themes imaginable in her debut.

“I’m really interested in art that examines the meaning of life, and in particular the question of ‘is there meaning for humans’,” she says. “We are meaning-seeking animals, and yet we may never get the answer to ‘what’s the point? Why are we all here?’ And that’s something that’s always in my mind. Always.”

Kangaroo Island itself feeds that questioning. “There’s so little human development, you really feel like you’re one of the animals,” Gifford says. “When you see a dead kangaroo, or a dead fish on the beach, what does it all mean? It just reinforces those questions for me, what’s it all about? And then out of that grew this idea.”

For David, time and budget constraints meant he had to approach this film in a very different way to his normal mode.

“A lot of my work in the past has been beauty commercials with people like Kendall Jenner and Zendaya, where you can spend six hours on one shot, you get three days for a 30-second commercial,” he says. By contrast, here he was rattling through four scenes a day.

Though it’s far from rough and ready – some of the cinematography is gorgeous, and the performances are consistently strong – David says “happy accidents” were critical to making it all work. “There’s just something real, handmade about the film that I think adds a nice touch.”

Still, it was seat-of-the-pants at times. A critical dinner party scene was done in just two takes, for example, despite the fact that in the first, neither of the two cameras captured Erik Thomson, who was a key player. “Thank God he did the exact same brilliant performance the second time around,” David says.

Speaking of God … It’s a rare thing for a movie to go there, with neither proselytising nor critical intent. But Kangaroo Island unabashedly does.

“I think it’s scary to make a movie about God and feelings and love and end of life, because it is leaning into drama and emotionality,” says Gifford, who says her own position on the topic of God is “just that constant questioning”.

“We actually are growing tired of films that feel a bit glib and ironic,” she adds, “and we just wanted to lean into that sentimentality.”

“For me,” says David (who is “reserving judgement till I die” on the God question), “it was nice to see a script where there is no bad person. It’s just that life can hit you a certain way, and you’re forced to react and make decisions that can make you look bad, but it doesn’t mean you are bad.

“This is life,” he adds. “This is a documentary on the human animal.”

Kangaroo Island is in cinemas August 21.

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