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Snowtown by Shaun Grant
JUDGES COMMENTS
Our mind shies away from the horrors of the serial killer but Shaun Grant’s script, Snowtown, places us inside the mind of a young man, Jamie (16), as he is groomed to take part in a series of brutal, sadistic murders and we, like him, seem to be rendered helpless. It is almost impossible to bear the reading of this script as it moves unrelentingly into ever darker reaches of human experience. The script is unflinching in its depiction of a dystopian world where everyone is pretty much on the scrap heap. It’s a world which is painful to read about.
Shaun Grant’s style is perfectly apt — spare and unflinching — we can almost smell the poverty. There is an extraordinary interweaving of the terrible, the macabre and the cruel with the most ordinary, mundane and tedious of events. Nor is there any respite — no looking away, no comfort. And into this world steps, fully formed, a monster, but he’s in disguise. He’s come to help, to get the place sorted, to cook nutritious meals, to somehow care. Like Jamie, we are fascinated and repelled. The characterisation is superb. These are entirely formed, fully-fledged human beings. Everything and everyone is entirely believable. There is not one superfluous detail. No let out. No remorse. It gets you in its grip and will not let you go. And so it begins and so, seemingly, it must work out its grisly course. This is a very hard script. It takes us into a kind of hell. And yet this hell happened — and it happened in our midst, in suburban Australia. It raises deep questions about our, the human, capacity for utter inhumanity. A deeply sobering script.