- Directed by Richard Stanley
- Written by Richard Stanley
- Stars Robert John Burke, Chelsea Field, Zakes Mokae
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 27 minutes
- Trailer:
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
It’s a beautiful and atmospheric film. We watched the final cut version that had additional footage. It’s a slow moving film that requires patience, but it’s worth the watch.
Synopsis
We get a voiceover explaining a legend about how a man became able to fly and then became a hunter. He is the “Dust Devil.”
A man walking down a desert road lays down in the road to listen. A car stops, and inside is a woman who picks him up and takes him home. That evening, the two have sweaty sex in the way you only can in the deserts of South Africa. He snaps her neck halfway through the act. Elsewhere, Ben Mukurob gets a strange phone call. Back in the desert, the Dust Devil does some kind of ritual and paints her house with weird art— all painted in blood. He packs her fingers in ice, burns down her house, and steals her car.
Back in civilization, Wendy Robinson breaks up with her husband Mark. Ben is a policeman, and he gets a call to check out the burning farmhouse, as it might be a murder. The house isn’t completely destroyed, and he looks at the strange paintings. They find the missing car, deserted, and he investigates that as well. Both the Dust Devil and Wendy make their way separately to the little dying town of Bethany.
Ben talks to the medical examiner about the case, and she says it looks like some kind of witchcraft. Neither of them believe in magic, but it’s clear the perpetrator does. Wendy continues driving through the desert and finally stops to pick up Mr. Dust Devil. They talk about the afterlife.
Ben chews out some underlings for torturing a witness, and the captain backs up Ben. The captain says the UN wants to take over jurisdiction of this case, so Ben is off the case as of tomorrow. The captain has records of similar murders going back to the early 1900s and hands those over to Ben. Crazy old Joe tries to explain the magic to Ben, but Ben’s not a believer. Joe says The Evil One has come to the dying town to gather souls, but until he’s finished his job, he’s trapped in human form. Joe explains a way to strip the creature of his powers by binding him with a magic stick.
Wendy decides they are driving in circles and stops next to a huge cliff. She kisses the hitchhiker, and later they dance. We see that husband Mark is in his car trying to find Wendy. He gets beat up at a bar at the same moment Wendy and the stranger have sex. The stranger doesn’t kill Wendy, but instead, bares his soul to her.
Wendy finds the stranger’s weird Polaroid photo collection and also his box of fingers. He swears those people all wanted to die; they came to him. He gets ready to stab her, but she knocks him out and drives away. She gets run off the road and runs away.
Ben comes to Mark, who is now in jail for getting beat up so many times. They pick up the trail and continue to search for Wendy. It doesn’t take long before Mark turns on Ben, who has the upper hand and leaves Mark handcuffed to the car in a dust storm.
The stranger finds her first. She is “attacked” by a windstorm in the desert. The next morning, she finds a small village in the desert, but it’s abandoned except for— Ben. They hear a phone inside one of the buildings, and Ben gives her his gun. Ben answers the phone, and it’s his dead wife calling to him.
Ben continues on and finds himself in an abandoned movie theater that isn’t completely abandoned. The still-nameless bad dude stabs Ben rather thoroughly.
Wendy points Ben’s gun at the stranger, but it doesn’t work. Ben drops his magic stick in front of the stranger, which binds him until Wendy blows his head apart with a shotgun. Ben and the magical stranger both die, leaving Wendy in the desert all alone.
Wendy walks through the desert until she comes across Mark, still cuffed to the police car. She points the gun at him, but then turns around and continues on through the desert; he won’t last very long out here.
Wendy walks along the desert road. Then she gets down on the ground to listen for a car…
Commentary
The voiceover narration is poetic, but doesn’t mean much other than to set the mood. The visuals are really cool. If you want to see life in 1990’s South Africa this is your film. There’s a lot of current events going on in the background news, and it looks like not a good place to be. It’s a different flavor of “folk horror,” but it definitely qualifies in that sub-genre. Sometimes the stranger seems like he wants to kill Wendy, and at other times, he appears to want to help her. He’s an inexplicable force of nature.
We get a few creature shots of the thing when it doesn’t look human, but they are brief flashes. Other than that, there’s not much in the way of monster special effects that are noticeable. There are some good gore effects though.
There’s a lot of really nice visual imagery and cinematography here, but it’s definitely style over substance, however, as the story plods along between cool scenery.
It’s slow. It’s atmospheric. It’s just plain weird. Some would definitely call it boring. Still, if you’ve got patience, it’s a really unusual film.