When his twin brother Max disappears, and becomes the chief suspect in a murder inquiry, Edward (John Bach) returns to the site of his brother’s last appearance - a remote island, once home to a tribe which mysteriously disappeared…
Only released in NZ in 1985, The Lost Tribe is one of the New Zealand films I have been most excited to see.
This was one of the films featured in Sam Neill and Judy Rymer’s Cinema of Unease - only one clip featured, but it has haunted me for 20 years.
I finally found a copy of the film, in time for October - the perfect month for viewing.
Written and directed by Jim Liang (Beyond a Reasonable Doubt), the film starts out as whodunit, as the missing Max’s twin is fingered by police for the murder of a sex worker.
Intriguing and atmospheric, The Lost Tribe takes its time, gradually leaving the familiarity of the police procedural behind for something more internal and messy - the family dynamic.
Made more uncanny by the narration (being performed by a child actor in a whisper), The Lost Triberefuses to offer any explanation for the strange goings on - is our protagonist being tormented by the ghosts of the indigenous people whose graves his brother disturbed? Or is the isolated island the perfect catalyst for unleashing deep-seated issues he has tried to bury?
I can see why it was signposted in Cinema of Unease - it is almost the perfect example of Sam Neill’s thesis, as a pakeha man struggles to impose his will upon a land he has no real relationship with.
Once Edward and Ruth are on the island, their deepest desires take over - and as night falls, the island begins to work on them.
While the build up is well-handled, I found the initial supernatural encounter a little lackluster - this might have something to do with watching a copy on YouTube on a laptop.
There might be something I am missing in terms of the sound design, and exterior night scenes did not come across that well.
The sequence has potential:
Edward and Ruth are under a sense of siege - while they have a gun, it does not provide any sense of security - if anything, it feels like a time bomb, the promise of violence underpinning the couple’s tense dynamic.
The brother’s conflict over the same woman is ultimately more unsettling than the potential supernatural elements
What does not help is that Edward does not appear to be the most stable person - there is an undercurrent of rage to Bach’s performance, a volatility that stands out in a movie whose forte is understatement.
When Ruth abandons Edward to patrol the island alone, it feels like a fuse has been lit for some kind of conflagration (it is from this final section of the film that we get the key image lifted by Cinema of Unease: Edward shouting at the forest while brandishing a machete).
While the film has been eerie up until this point, it has started to feel a little listless.
Now there is a sense of tension, a sense that the film is heading to some unknown destination. While that shot with the machete I mentioned earlier has a certain power, the shot that stuck with me comes shortly afterward - a moving shot of Edward’s feet stomping through his brother’s survey site, nervily hacking through the survey lines.
The film takes a turn for the gothic, with Edward’s discovery of the preserved tribesmen in a cave, and finally a nightmarish confrontation with his brother that raises more questions than it answers:
Is Max real? Was he ever real?
These questions are rendered irrelevant, and the film ends on a perverse family reunion - a mockery of togetherness where none of the underlying tensions have been resolved.
Strikingly photographed and well acted - if a little low key, The Lost Tribe is one film I would love to watch on the big screen - watching it the way I did, I feel like I need another viewing to fully get onboard with it.
Even if it (questionably) does not quite make the landing, it is conceptually fascinating, and it has stuck with me far longer than I expected it to.
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