Wrong World (1985) User Reviews

Nhillistic film! Gives expression to socio-political & cultural disaffiliation and shows how the criminal/drug subculture closes in to hoover up the otherwise free dropout.

[justinmo-1 · 7/10 · 11 July 2006]

This is an Australian Road Movie. There is a town on the Victorian/South Australian border called Nhill, along with names like Mount Disappointment, Nhill gives one an an idea of how the Europeans greeted the semi-arid expanses of Australia. This film starts in 80's South America, in famines and poverty and a NGO doctor giving up on the whole idea of making any impact on the problems and dropping out into injectable drug use and seclusion. Returning to Australia and Melbourne drug culture, supported by handouts from rich friends, he starts a journey that turns out to be an ironic existential voyage, to return a hooker-like drug addicted girl he meets to her home in Nhill, and they pursue their headlong flight to Nhill with a relentless, heady and loving nihilism that is a delight. Road to nowhere? Exactly!

On the road to madness.

[DukeEman · 6/10 · 3 February 2003]

We enter the mind of a disillusioned doctor and journey with him across the state of Victoria with a junkie female who has her own problems. The flashback scenes to other countries - with Moir's narrative - works well as does the music. It's when they open their mouths that the dialogue seems a little clumsy. The ending I like.

Poignant but a bit aimless

[PeterM27 · 4/10 · 23 January 2021]

Richard Moir was Australia's restless young man of the 70s and 80s. Here he plays David, a dedicated doctor who went to help the poor of Bolivia, only to lose himself and develop a drug problem. Returning to Australia, he feels unable to fit in, and checks into a rehab clinic where he meets Mary (Jo Kennedy), a pretty young woman with a heroin problem. Together they run away, and, after some unsavoury meetings with Mary's low-life friends, they head bush, eventually deciding to head for Nhill, where Mary's 'boring' sister lives. The film is told through philosophic voice-overs (in Bob Ellis' usually witty style) and through David's flash-backs to his life in Peru and an aimless road-trip in the US. It has been compared to Wim Wenders' style, and it has something of that, but lacks Wenders' transcendent photography which lifts his films to a poetic level. There is some poetry here, but too much murky photography and too many aimless characters.