In 2003,the film swept the awards at the Melbourne Underground Film Festival. But,when cinema distributors failed to come flocking,he cut it back to 30 minutes and entered it in the 2004 St Kilda Film Festival. At the urging of Sydney filmmaker Nash Edgerton,Ryan restored the film to feature length,adding footage he’d previously discarded and generally restructuring and fine-tuning the material. The film went into limited release around the country in 2005.
A mockumentary shot in the back streets of Melbourne and on the outskirts of Moe,it’s a low-budget gem born in the wake ofPulp Fiction (1995),its DNA laced with some deliciously black humour. The gloriously Australian mode of euphemistically-driven,po-faced understatement also characterises the TV series that followed.
Alas,while it eventually opened in the US to generally positive reviews,the film did minimal business at the Australian box-office and vanished almost without trace. What it left behind,though,was Ray,the hitman who’s the title character inMr Inbetween. The series’ third and final season is currently unspooling on Fox Showcase.
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Written by Ryan,directed by Edgerton,and produced by Michele Bennett for Jungle Entertainment and Blue-Tongue Films (of which Edgerton is a founding member),the first series was made for F/X in the US and launched at the Sundance Film Festival in 2018. Soon afterwards,it screened at the Melbourne International Film Festival before its TV premiere on Foxtel a few weeks later.
Just asThe Magician acquired its title from Ray’s skill at making bodies vanish,Mr Inbetween refers to his place in the general scheme of things. He’s the middle-man:somebody hires him to do “a job”,usually bar owner Freddy (Damon Herriman),and he does it to some poor,unsuspecting schmuck.
The series is a portrait of the hitman as an ordinary bloke who abides by his own rules:“If I hit someone,I generally got a pretty good reason,” he explained in season one. He cares about family and is loyal to those he’s come to think of as mates,like Gary (Justin Rosniak) and Dave (the ever-reliable Matt Nable). He understands why his ex-wife (Natalie Tran) jumped the fence and why paramedic girlfriend Ally (Brooke Satchwell) might find his rough-and-ready ways too much to take. But he’s a loving dad to his now 12 year-old daughter,Brittany (Chika Yasumura),and was an attentive carer for his brother Bruce (Nicholas Cassim),who’d been stricken with motor neurone disease.