★★★★
Malcolm Toohey is a good man with a hair-trigger temper and a reckless disposition. He's also a cop. It's an inflammatory combination that is bound to land him in trouble sooner or later.
Felony, a new Australian thriller written by its star, Joel Edgerton, kicks off with that moment. Toohey has just led a successful drugs raid, leaving him with a bruise caused by a bullet hitting his protective vest. Nonetheless, he not only stays around for a few celebratory drinks with his team, he decides to drive home. It's a characteristic but disastrous move. On the way, his car knocks a nine year-old paperboy off his bike, critically injuring him, and Toohey, panic-stricken, tells the traffic police that the boy was already lying on the road when he found him.
Around this lapse, Edgerton and director Matthew Saville have wound a sinuous morality tale. You are inclined at first to size it up as a taut little procedural about a police cover-up. But after a few more twists you find your sympathies swinging in all directions. Finally, you are deep in a discussion with yourself about relative moral values and what exactly is meant by doing the right thing.
Aptly enough, Saville worked on the TV adaptation of Christos Tsiolkas's The Slap, another story about the ripple effect of a single incendiary act. And just to cement the connection, Melissa George, who played one of the series' most provocative characters, is cast as Toohey's wife.
Colluding with Toohey in his decision to lie about the accident is his senior officer and mentor, Carl Summer, a character with an avuncular manner and a tough centre. He is played by Britain's Tom Wilkinson, who is cast so often and so effectively as an innately decent man that it is always a shock to see him flashing his dark side. And here, those flashes are especially chilling. Summer is so rational and so likeably sardonic for so much of the time that the nastiness comes as a complete betrayal of everything he has seemed to be.
That is certainly the way Jai Courtney's rookie detective, Jim Melic, sees it. He has been assigned to work with Summer as his partner and they soon begin to irritate one another. It is a familiar brand of mismatch – between the young cop who has been trained to do everything by the book and the old cop whose ethical sensibilities have been blunted by his loyalty to the force, no matter what.
In a more conventional film, there would be a neat and unequivocal conclusion to all this. But Edgerton and Saville have refused to short-change any of their characters, and their complexities ensure an ending that makes you think – and go on thinking about one of the finest Australian films to come along this year.
