From dystopian drama to heart-rending documentary: the 10 best Australian films of 2023

The punk horror of Talk to Me, the beauty of Shayda and the heartbreak of Man on Earth – it has been a cracker year

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In these lists of the best Australian films of the year, I keep my eyes out for any patterns or trends. For example, three of 2022’s best titles were about rivers; half of 2021’s were documentaries; 2019 saw a sharp disconnect between the best versus the most popular Aussie films; and 2018 brought a batch of particularly bold and uncompromising works.

Perhaps this year, you, dear reader, can have a crack at discerning a pattern for yourselves. The 10 films below are a rather eclectic batch, spanning a wide range of genres – from dystopian drama to heartbreaking documentary, romance, outback noir, horror and more. To qualify for this list, films needed to have had a release outside the festival circuit, either theatrically or on a streaming platform.

10. Limbo

Where to watch: ABC iView

The great Indigenous auteur Ivan Sen – best known for directing the Mystery Road movies – returns to sun-baked outback noir, reducing the heat colour-wise with a spartan-looking monochrome veneer. But emotionally Limbo swelters, following a dejected heroin-injecting detective (Simon Baker, transcending stereotype) who investigates the unsolved murder of an Indigenous girl killed 20 years ago. The drama is absorbingly staged and, temporally speaking, curiously adrift, occurring well after conventional moments of narrative inflection, summoning wearied characters who reminisce on a far-flung past. Read the full review.

9. Man on Earth

Where to watch: not now streaming but community screenings can be requested

Tears were rolling down my face by the end of Amiel Courtin-Wilson’s heartbreaking but beautifully humane documentary about the final days of Bob Rosenzweig, a 65-year-old Jewish man living in Washington who has Parkinson’s disease and decides to end his life through assisted dying. Rosenzweig – who designed bathrooms for the likes of Elton John and Janet Jackson – invited the Australian film-maker to record his exit from the mortal coil, making preparations and bidding farewell to loved ones. It’s a tough watch but we emerge from films like this deeper and richer. You’ll never forget that ending. Read the full review.

8. The Survival of Kindness

Where to watch: available for rent on Amazon Prime/Apple TV+

Rolf de Heer’s first solo-directed film in almost a decade is a strange one, even for the man who brought us Bad Boy Bubby. This near dialogue-free, symbolically heavy experience is based in a dystopian future and follows a protagonist billed as BlackWoman (an entrancing Mwajemi Hussein) who is dumped in a padlocked cage in the desert by gas mask-wearing oppressors. When she frees herself, we slowly piece together more about this mysterious world, which has obviously gone to the dogs for unknown reasons. Told with striking visuality, the tone is meditative and cryptic. Read the full review.

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7. You Can Go Now

Where to watch: SBS On Demand/Amazon Prime

Larissa Behrendt’s spunky documentary about Richard Bell suggests the artist – a member of the Kamilaroi, Kooma, Jiman and Gurang Gurang communities – has a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde thing going on. He has two personalities: there’s Richard, a man “grounded in his art and his country”, and there’s Richie: a rabble-rouser and mischief-maker whose stunts include gatecrashing the Venice Biennale in a most spectacular way. This fabulously festive film doesn’t just convey the subject’s life and career but his attitude, turning aspects of his work into structural elements and visual flourishes. Read the full review.

6. The Royal Hotel

Where to watch: in cinemas now

The last scene (no spoilers) in Kitty Green’s new film didn’t sit right with me but everything else is great in a nerve-jangling way. Cash-strapped US backpackers Hanna (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick) take a job at a pub in dust-caked nowhere, continuing a long history of Aussie productions that plonk foreigners in Woop Woop then assault them with sun and yobbos. The women encounter sexism and misogyny, and the threat of violence almost always implied – not necessarily in the sense that it happens off-screen, but that it might happen at any moment. A tense and gripping film. Read the full review.

5. Christmess

Where to watch: Binge

Playing a character similar to his part in Heath Davis’s film Broke, which made my list of the best Australian films from 2016, Steve Le Marquand is again superb as a broken-down alcoholic trying to get back on the straight and narrow in Davis’s latest production. I don’t love the title (geddit: his name’s Chris; his life’s a mess; and the story is set during Christmas) but almost everything else about this film is top shelf. There are highly persuasive performances and softly stylish camerawork depicting lower-class Aussie suburbia. The script contemplates the inescapability of the past versus the potential for a brighter tomorrow – which might sound a little sentimental but there’s nary a trace of cheese.

4. Of an Age

Where to watch: Amazon Prime

The writer/director Goran Stolevski’s brilliantly odd horror movie You Won’t Be Alone topped my list last year. His follow-up is universes apart: a romantic drama that’s raw and sweet in a tough-hearted, realistic way. It starts with urgency, a young woman Ebony (Hattie Hook) calling her dance partner, Nikola (Elias Anton), and telling him to collect her, post-haste, from a beach she’s woken up on. The pace steadies when Ebony’s older brother Adam (Thom Green) offers to drive Nikola to find her. The seeds of a romantic relationship between the two young men are planted; we wait and wait for them to grow but this very memorable film is never slow or languorous. Read the full review.

3. Shayda

Where to watch: in select cinemas now

After the Australian-Iranian writer/director Noora Niasari’s feature debut premiered at Sundance, word made the rounds that Zar Amir Ebrahimi’s performance as the titular woman fleeing an abusive husband was something to look out for. She doesn’t disappoint: it’s a rousing portrayal, subtle but finely layered, in a film that could be described using the same plaudits. Inspired by Niasari’s own childhood experience living in a Brisbane refuge, the director gives the drama a pressurising effect, the air intensifying in a long, slow crescendo. Read the full review.

2. Talk to Me

Where to watch: Netflix

Such a simple premise, so well executed. A group of thrill-seeking teens get their kicks from using a creepy ceramic hand to (as you do) summon spirits that jump inside their bodies and take them for a spin. When Mia (Sophie Wilde) starts believing she can use it to converse with her deceased mother, you can sense where the film is broadly going (to hell and back) – but you can’t second-guess the verve and chutzpah of its execution. The co-directors, Danny and Michael Philippou, build a spunky kind of dread, creating a film that’s visually interesting from start to end. Read the full review.

1. The Plains

Where to watch: Mubi

David Easteal’s three-hour drama, which made the festival rounds last year, is brilliantly paradoxical: a work of art that’s amazingly ordinary. Shot almost entirely from the backseat of a car, The Plains captures several work-to-home commutes for a middle-aged lawyer (Andrew Rakowski) whose routine includes calling his mother and wife, and listening to talkback radio. Sound interesting? Of course not. Yet this quietly revolutionary film reminds us that narratives are everywhere, embedded in daily life, and that there are no “right” or “true” motion picture experiences – only different scales of convention and experimentation. Read the full review.

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