PURE SCUM – Review by Silvi Van-Wall

Lightning-paced, violent to the extreme, and bursting with melodrama, Pure Scum is the antithesis to a comfort watch – indeed, it is a film so viscerally unpleasant that I had difficult pinpointing whatever magic sauce it had in it that made me want to keep watching.

Two trouble-seeking private schoolboys, Ayden – a ‘gifted child’ turned drug dealer – and Jesse – a manipulative, charismatic rebel – decide to go out on the town after their high school graduation. Mere minutes later, a devastating car crash leaves them foolishly fleeing to the Melbourne CBD to escape the consequences.

Bad decision after bad decision turns a bad night into the worst night imaginable, and transforms this film from a mere ‘actions have consequences’ PSA to a series of near-divine punishments one might call ‘the eshay’s eternal damnation’.

Pure Scum is a new – and aptly titled – Australian independent feature that’s playing at the Fantastic Film Festival across Melbourne and Sydney currently, and will likely have a long festival shelf life ahead of it. It’s pulpy, unique and confidently crafted, well enough that it’s no wonder it’s gaining local notoriety. But there’s something lacking here that would tip this film from ‘okay, I’ll watch it once’ into ‘hell yeah!’ territory.

With one blood-soaked sneaker firmly in Ozploitation territory, Pure Scum narrowly avoids becoming a laughable montage of Final Destination-esque violence by using time-jumps to a future news interview about the fateful night.

This device adds an element of ‘whodunnit’ to the narrative, as the audience scrambles to piece together exactly what went down that prompted a 60 Minutes style sit-down with everyone in Ayden and Jesse’s lives.

Thanks to some decent script writing and a marvellous turn from each of the two lead actors, Will Hutchins and Nikita Chronis, the characters of Ayden and Jesse are compelling to watch, despite being real big pieces of shit (Pieces of Shit could have definitely worked as the title, just saying). Continue reading