This'll really cheer you up: it's a depressing tale about depressed folk living in the dullest of Australian suburbs without a glimmer of light at the end of their murky tunnel. But while The Boys is about as far from laugh-a-minute movie-making as cinema ever gets, it's a gripping drama nonetheless.
Director Rowan Woods cleverly uses flashbacks and flashforwards to tell the story of a violent ex-con (Wenham), his abused girlfriend (Collette) and his equally amoral brothers. It's not really a story as such, not in the traditional sense of having a beginning, middle and end: it plays rather like a character study drawn from a theatre piece.
But these characters are compelling in their vileness, and the underlying threat of domestic violence makes The Boys truly chilling. Good - - but don't expect it to be fun.
