Rogue (2007) review

Dir. Greg McLean

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★★

Wolf Creek established Australian filmmaker Greg McLean as a rock-solid horror filmmaker, who also acted as a craftsman, even if his work involved showing a darker, sinister side of his homeland. McLean took viewers down under to a seldom-seen side of Australian; the deep recesses of the outback where people could vanish without a trace and an evil, backwoods killer like John Jarratt’s Mick could exist unbothered.

McLean brings a similar sort of beautifully photographed terror to Rogue, his follow-up, also set in Australia, specifically the country’s Northern Territory. The slender premise loosely revolves around an American journalist named Pete (Michael Vartan) joining a group of tourists aboard a crocodile-watching river cruise in Kakadu National Park. When the boat’s skipper, Kate (Radha Mitchell), detours after seeing a distress flare go off in the distance, she and the group find nothing but a sunken boat.

Soon, the side of their boat is split by something unseen but evidently ginormous, rendering them marooned on a small island of mud that will surely be engulfed by the rising tide come nightfall. Lurking underneath the swampy waters is a 25-foot rogue saltwater crocodile.

Rogue is unsurprisingly indebted to certain founding fathers of the genre, namely Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, which set the standard for a tense creature vs. human(s) feature. There’s undoubted inspiration drawn from other swamp-set thrillers, such as Anaconda and Lake Placid, although where those films possessed a level of campiness that made them enjoyable on a comedic level, McLean’s work is uncompromisingly serious, which results in a lot of positives surfacing.

Instead of trying to install comedy into what is ultimately a terrifying premise, McLean focuses on slowburn pacing and character development for much of the first 30 minutes. Beyond those on the river cruise, there are a pair of backwoods bumpkins (Damien Richardson and Sam Worthington of Avatar fame), who pop up to irritate Kate while she’s trying to do her job. John Jarratt even returns to play the total antithesis of Mick. There’s also a heightened sense of urgency resulting from Kate’s decision to track down the distress flare. Some on the boat have flights to catch and relatives to see. This increases their desperation when they find themselves stuck deep in the bowels of the Australian swamp with no clear path out.

Then there’s the photography, well-lit and gorgeous, even at night. Cinematographer Will Gibson opens Rogue with sweeping shots of the Australian Outback. The river tour itself feels like an uneasy travelogue as the sun is clearly starting to fade and give way to nighttime, where flashlights illuminate already murky waters. Gibson is up to the challenge in making all of the action as visible as it is unnerving.

Maybe it’s the inconsistent output compared to his contemporaries. Maybe it was the long gap between Wolf Creek and its sequel. Maybe many were like myself and held off on watching Rogue for years because the “Dimension Extreme” label on the DVD isn’t known to be a stamp of quality. Whatever the case is for Greg McLean seemingly being an underrated name in horror, the time has long passed to give him his flowers for working so creatively and artistically within the genre.

Starring: Michael Vartan, Radha Mitchell, Sam Worthington, Damien Richardson, John Jarratt, and Stephen Curry. Directed by: Greg McLean.