The Rover (2014)

Directed: David Michôd
Written: David Michôd and Joel Edgerton
Producer: Liz Watts (Porchlight Films), David Linde (Lava Bear) and David Michôd
Composer: Antony Partos
Cinematographer: Natasha Braier
Cast: Guy Pearce (Eric), Robert Pattinson (Reynolds), Scoot McNairy (Henry), David Field (Archie), Richard Green (Storekeeper), Gillian Jones (Grandma), Susan Prior (Dorothy Peeples), Nash Edgerton (Town Soldier), Anthony Hayes (Sgt Rick Rickoffersen) and Jamie Fallon (Colin)

Release date: Premiered at Midnight Screening, Cannes Film Festival, 18 May 2014.

Australian premiere: Sydney Film Festival 2014, 7 June 2014

Synopsis: The Australian Outback, ten years after a great Western economic collapse. It’s a near future of social and economic decay. Services, utilities, law and order have fallen into dangerous disrepair. And yet people from all corners of the world have come to this place to work the mines that feed the Asian century, and with them have come the leeches, refuse, hustlers and criminals who hope to exploit the mines’ margins.

In the middle of this world is Eric (GUY PEARCE), alone and empty – once a farmer, now a drifter, little more than a shell of anger and ennui. He has nothing left but his car and the road. We meet him mid-journey, possibly his last.

He pulls up at a dirty Cambodian diner in the middle of nowhere. He steps into its emptiness and unbearably loud pop music. Two Khmer guys slump asleep in a corner. Eric takes a seat at the bar and helps himself to tea.

When a gang of petty criminals – Henry (SCOOT McNAIRY), Archie (DAVID FIELD) and Caleb (TAWANDA MANYIMO) – flee the scene of a scam gone horribly wrong, they crash their truck outside the Cambodian diner and manage to crawl out of the wreck and steal Eric’s car.
And thus the story begins. Eric will do whatever he must to get his car back.

He manages to get the gang’s wrecked vehicle back on the road and is soon confronted by the badly wounded Rey (ROBERT PATTINSON), Henry’s young and seemingly simple little brother, left behind to die in the aftermath mess of the gang’s heist-gone-wrong.

Eric and Rey are forced into an unlikely partnership. Eric wants his car back and the young and naïvely helpless Rey is the only person who knows where it might have gone. Together they travel the desert roads, encountering the refuse and survivors of the new/old Australian landscape – murderous carnival workers and circus performers, Asian refugees and Aboriginal kids, traumatised shopkeepers and the remaining fragments of a besieged and disillusioned military trying to hold the world together.

Official Trailer and introduction by David: