Galore

Galore is an Australian film steeped in the tradition of Australian films doing poignant, still dramas about big feelings and life events happening to the lives of melancholy, lethargic people. Themes of small town violence and suffocation prevail, ever-heightened by the lonely, expansive beauty of the film's suburban setting.

Presented against the ticking time-bomb of a looming mass bushfire, Galore uses recurring motifs of smoke and heat as thematic housemates for its primary story about a group of teens at the height of their listlessness. The film builds your expectations towards there being a cataclysmic shedding of their childhood in time with the fire consuming their small town, but when it finally arrives, the bushfire comes on a downbeat, and isn't, as you might have thought, the great disrupter of all the events leading to it.

In fact, the film's narrative climax happens some time before the fire, and the fire itself is a symbol that shifts from being one of 'burgeoning adulthood' to one of 'emotional purge' – something that enables the characters to reset and start again. It's a muddied pay-off that leans on melodrama in a way that undercuts the subtlety elsewhere in the film. But, successful as an acute and evocative study of youth in transition, Galore is another rich slice of Australiana more than worthy of its entry into the ever-growing canon.