Hail

Overview

Hail is something remarkable; it is the kind of film which completely reimagines how powerful cinema can be. Attracting attention when it won the Age Critic's Award for Best Feature Film at this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival, it is one of the most powerful films this country has produced in the past couple of years.

The film is fundamentally a love story. Danny (Daniel P. Jones) gets out of jail and moves back in with his girlfriend Leanne (Leanne Letch). They love each other in a way that is disarming and moving even in its simplest guises, existing in a world of the everyday: smoking, eating together, arguing, and making up. And then suddenly everything good is taken away from Danny, and eaten up with malevolence, he embarks on a journey of vengeance and violence.

Hail is the first feature from director Amiel Courtin-Wilson, best known for the documentaries Bastardy and Catch My Disease. The film is the product of a six-year collaboration with Daniel P. Jones. Danny had only been out of prison a few days when they first met at Melbourne's Plan B theatre company on a project designed to rehabilitate prisoners.

Hail is inspired by Danny's real life, with the love interest in the film, Leanne, played by Danny's real-life partner. The struggles he faces, like trying to get a job and simply trying to deal with the bastard tormenting him in his head, are a distillation of Danny's life in the years since he left prison. Fiction intrudes halfway through the film, although the boundary between fiction and reality, between documentary and feature film is increasingly blurred.

And although Danny and Leanne aren’t professional actors, Hail doesn't have that lingering trace of awkwardness that other films have when non-professional actors are fed dialogue that doesn’t sit easily in their mouths. While the first half of the film can feel laborious at times — a little like listening to the argument of two people holding a bag of goon on the last bus home at night — the second half sweeps you up, proving what a remarkable film this really is.