That this extraordinarily mature and accomplished work is the feature debut of a twentysomething director is difficult to believe; that it achieved its visual richness and epic feel on a pittance of a budget should be a wake-up call to any filmmaker who has ever pled poverty as justification for lack of polish. A film at once headily close-up in its attention to its characters' emotions, and sweeping in its depiction of their vast, untamed surroundings, Van Diemen's Land evokes no lesser titles than Apocalypse Now, Deliverance and Badlands. Like those illustrious predecessors, it weaves elements of genre horror into a profound meditation upon individual versus collective moral responsibility, the motivations for violence, and the confrontation between man and hostile nature. Based upon the grim true story of cannibal convict Alexander Pearce, the film was shot in the Franklin River area of Tasmania, a spectacular wilderness that remains broadly unaltered since Pearce's time. Pearce was an Irish farmhand from County Fermanagh who was deported to Van Diemen's Land (as Tasmania was then known) in 1819 for the theft of six pairs of shoes. In 1822, along with a small band of other Scottish, Irish and English convicts, he made a break from the Sarah Island penal colony. Conditions were harsh, supplies nonexistent, and – as the film slowly reveals – Pearce was prepared to abandon all principles, loyalties and taboos in order to survive. This monstrous figure is lent a strange poignancy here by Oscar Redding's powerful lead performance, and by a finely-judged script, co-written by Redding and director Jonathan auf der Heide. Beneath the film's sensational, gory adventure narrative churns another story: one of men without women, displaced from any domestic sphere and thus from any meaningful moral structure. No woman is glimpsed; indeed, in a salty aside that exemplifies the film's enjoyably dastardly sense of humour, one of the band dismisses the whole other gender thus: "If they didn't have c***s, you'd throw stones at them." Without sex (and implicitly in place of it), there is violence. "A man with no blood on his hands is no man," notes Pearce in his minimal voiceover, spoken in Irish Gaelic. This being a project that brooked no half-measures, Redding learned the language from scratch for the film.