Matrixiole Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

Plustown A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

Paynbob It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

Justina The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

rodney_crute A previous reviewer actually wrote that this film was the best crime thriller from Australia since "Two Hands. No way. "Two Hands" had Bryan Brown, Heath Ledger and Rose Byrne; a good script, direction and editing. This film was poorly paced and poorly acted. There were too many scenes in which nothing happened to progress the story. The script was unbelievable and the direction was self indulgent (perhaps writers shouldn't direct films of their scripts or perhaps directors shouldn't write scripts for their films); there was no discipline. My wife and I felt no empathy with the characters. Some of the actors playing police officers must have studied acting by watching 1960s Australian cop dramas. Very disappointing.

Rick James "Noise" is proof positive you don't need a big budget to make a compelling story with remarkably good production values and fine acting. I don't usually, but in this case I viewed the background "extras" available on the DVD and was impressed by how much the company did with how meager resources. The result is a credit to them. The acting is top-notch, but as others have said the plot is disjointed, doesn't always make sense, and has some loose ends. The script clearly had a hatchet taken to it.There is also some implausibility and irrelevance, such as why the boss would be angry at him for being sick and what is the importance of the tinnitus after all. Even laid-back Ozzie police officers must cringe at the protagonist receiving hearsay testimony in the trailer without so much as taking positive identification from the people who visit, and the idea of leaving a single officer alone in a location where he/she is vulnerable to assault ... and worse, as we eventually see.All the faults not withstanding, this is a film worth paying attention to, with good directing and some taut moments that are pretty compelling. The budget was undoubtedly less than the stipend a mediocre Hollywood star would command, so it is a job well done. Finally, the DVD lacks any subtitles, and some of the "Strine" dialect and accent is hard to get the first or even second time around.

bradjanet For me, this was the best Australian film since "Lantana" ... no, I'll revise that and say it's better than "Lantana". The script was brilliantly written, with believable dialogue and characterization, and yet with an eerie, unsettling tension and mystery about it. The acting was very good all round, and in the case of Brendan Cowell, superb. I loved the music score and the moody photography. One of the most outstanding features of this most unusual film was the outstanding sound design. The scene where Brendan Cowell's character tries to drown out the ringing in his ears by making a variety of loud noises is uniquely effective in it's use of sound as an element of a film. You never quite know where this film is going, but when you get there, it's devastating. This film does on a minuscule budget what many big-budget Hollywood blockbusters could never do ... it touches your heart and it makes you use your brain.

genathan-1 I thought this was really an excellent movie. It was well-written, acted and directed. There was real drama going on here, and you really felt for both the cop who may have a brain tumor and the young girl finding herself in the middle of a bloodbath. While it was a "small" film in the sense that it contained no "stars" and it was clearly shot on a modest budget, I could easily see it being remade into a large, big budget Hollywood production. My sense, though, is that it would lose much of the intimacy and emotional power if such a translation were to occur.It does, by the way, have my favorite curse I have heard in years: "f*ck knuckle."