Healing

Overview

Stock characters and clunky, heavy-handed storytelling keeps Healing, the new Australian drama from Peaches director Craig Monahan, well and truly tethered to the ground. Co-scripted by Monahan alongside veteran TV writer Alison Nisselle, the film takes its inspiration from a real-life state prison program, in which inmates in minimum security help rehabilitate injured birds of prey. Despite the unique premise and setting, however, the film soon grows dreary and unfocused — leaving an unfortunate cast of workman local actors with no opportunity to soar.

The most interesting thing about Healing is the location in which it takes place. A minimum security jail in bushland Victoria, the facility looks more like a camp site than a penitentiary, and offers an original spin on the traditional prison setting. The men housed here are at the end of their sentences, or have been convicted of lesser crimes. The focus is no longer on punishment, but on rehabilitation.

It's in this setting that dedicated prison case-officer Matt Perry (Hugo Weaving), working in conjunction with staff at the nearby Healesville Sanctuary, decides to establish the avian care program. The timing coincides with the arrival of a new batch of prisoners, including sullen 18-year murder veteran Viktor Khadem (Don Hany). Despite the objections of his supervisors, Perry decides to put Viktor in charge of the initiative, in the hopes that caring for the animals will help prepare him for his imminent release.

While the birds, particularly Viktor's favourite wedge-tailed raptor Jasmine, are undeniably majestic, animals yearning for freedom is a ham-fisted motif for a prison movie. Sadly, such clumsiness is all too typical of Niselle and Monahan's screenplay, in which plot points seem to vanish and personalities change drastically from scene to scene. Viktor goes from serene one minute to intolerably bull-headed the next, while antagonistic inmate Warren (Anthony Hayes) sneers constantly with one-dimensional villainy. Even worse, the arc of the film's most intriguing character — Viktor's drug-addled bunkmate Shane (a twitchy Mark Leonard Winter) — gets no resolution at all.

Hany and Weaving are solid as always, but both have been far better elsewhere. For that matter, so has Monahan. Both Peaches and his debut feature The Interview had a certain edginess. Healing, on the other hand, feels safe to the point of total blandness.