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Review
A Cry in the Dark
In his new film A Cry in the Dark, the great Australian director Fred Schepisi has made
an epic about a nation's response to a mystery. This daring film reveals the underside to a
nation's character, and explores how different elements of a society can feed on each other
for their own self-sawing purposes.
The harrowing film is based on fact. Lindy Chamberlain and her family go on a camping
trip to a popular tourist site, Ayers Rock, a gigantic formation heaving skyward out of the
Australian Outback. When they gather round their campfire one night, they hear a sound
similar to a baby’s cry.
Lindy goes to check on her nine-week-old infant daughter who she has put to bed in a
nearby tent. As she approaches, she sees a dingo (an Australian wild dog) bolt out of the tent
in the moonlight, and makes the horrifying discovery that her baby has vanished.
At first, the nation is sympathetic, and Lindy is exonerated from any wrongdoing. But
soon suspicions grow. The Chamberlain's are, after all, Seventh-day Adventists, and don't
they believe in performing strange sacrificial rites, the public begins to wonder? And could a
dingo, the beloved symbol of the Outback to so many, have actually eaten a baby? And even
if such a story were true, shouldn't the local police, who bungled the early stages of the
investigation, keep the story, well, hushed-up, since it might wreck tourism?
Enter the media, who provide both fuel and wind for the fire, by irresponsibly reporting
the frenzy of rumors and suspicions, keeping the story wildly alive for ratings and
readership.
Here Schepisi makes one of the key intellectual points of the film. In an effort to warn
other parents of how the event took place so that it won't be repeated, the Chamberlains
grant television and press interviews in which they are cruelly exploited.
The venom is focused on Lindy. She does not fall apart in front of the camera as the
public expects she should. She reserves her grieving for her family and friends, the people
who care about her. And the media begin to track her comings and goings like bloodhounds
in pursuit.
The case is reopened. The superstitions deepen. Lindy, calm after the agony, cool before
the cameras, unwilling to cry on cue and collapse before a nation confidently sipping its beer
during the evening TV news, is condemned because she doesn't act under the circumstances
the way a woman is "supposed" to act. This is the heart of Schepisi's movie. The
Chamberlains, Lindy in particular, are different from the majority. They must be bad. They
cannot be trusted. Laws must be used to condemn them and lock them away.
The most and least that can be said of Meryl Streep and Sam Neil’s performances as the
Chamberlains is that they simply "are"; we never doubt that the actors are the Chamberlains.
Space limitations prevent me from discussing Schepisi's brilliant narrative method, but we
never doubt that we are in the hands of a master.
A Cry in the Dark is, in all respects, a superb movie.
-Terry Francis
It Takes
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