‘The Survival of Kindness’ Review: A Powerful Pessimism Scorches the Earth in Rolf de Heer’s Haunting Colonial-Oppression Allegory
Jessica Kiang It is probably Australia. But it could be anywhere where the sun is hot enough to bake the earth into boundless stretches of cracked crazy-paving. It is probably an alternate recent past. But it could be any period in human history when mankind has divided itself into categories of oppressor and oppressed. The most remarkable aspect of Rolf de Heer’s elegiac, elemental “The Survival of Kindness” is that it is an allegory so direct as to be obvious, told in a style so spartan as to be opaque. Not one syllable of intelligible language is spoken, but the choral anguish of generations subjugated to colonial cruelty rings loud through every wordless frame. In a forbiddingly desolate desert landscape, shot with DP Maxx Corkindale’s elegantly unadorned realism, the only evidence of humanity is the very definition of inhumanity: a crude iron cage in which is locked a woman (an amazing debut by Mwajemi Hussein), who has been left there to die. Only named in the credits as BlackWoman, she is not perhaps as alone as she first appears. Under the tires of the trailer, two columns of ants go to war.