The Plains

This off-the-radar contender for Film of 2022 takes place almost entirely within a car, has an unorthodox duration, and characters whom we only half-see. Yet it’s extraordinary. Sometimes a car can be an ad-hoc ‘honesty booth’; two passengers together yet apart, spared from eye contact. The Plains plays with this ‘car-confessional’ but leans away from escalating psychodrama, and towards the much greater, subtler pathos that bubbles up around extended chats between a jaded commuting suburban Melbourne lawyer and his occasional younger passenger, plus mysterious disembodied images of the Australian bush. A unique docu-drama hybrid.

[Lawyer/driver] Andrew and I worked together a number of years ago in the outer suburbs of Melbourne, which is a very sprawling city. …It was a workplace like any other, there were many employees, and we discovered that we lived near each other closer to the centre of Melbourne. Up until then I had caught the train for the commute, but then Andrew started offering to drive me home. …When I knew Andrew back then, he would call his mother and his wife during the drive, and I’d hear some of these conversations. …The genesis for the idea came from that period of time in my life.

Director David Easteal, from an interview with Senses of Cinema