Bedevil (1993)

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

BeDevil (1993) addresses the marginalization of Aboriginal Australians in the events, symbolism, and media hype surrounding the bicentenary of European settlement in Australia in 1988. Tracey Moffatt challenges the racial stereotypes by gearing a political process of reform and self-recognition though her postmodernist 'identity search'-driven work aiming at appropriation of hegemonic spectacle. BeDevil disrupts the hegemony of the pure original canon that excluded Aboriginal Australians from the mainstream. This sort of exclusion practice is a known phenomenon worldwide, more so happens in the post-colonial Third World countries like Pakistan and India as both exclude their ethnic minorities from the mainstream media. The author echoes back to Moffatt's stories of bedeviling experiences with tales of similar issues around race, gender, and normality from Islamic Republic of Pakistan, wherein post-Independence immigrants are constantly struggling for appropriation and redefinition of their identities. The Pakistan born children of miscegenation are considered immigrants by descent despite the facts concerning Islamic origins, two nations' theory, migration, and over 60 years residency. The author shares the mutually bedeviling experiences of 'othering' and a struggle with the notions of shared social conscience and histories between children of miscegenation in Australia and Pakistan in the context of the Australian trilogy.

In the best style of the supernatural stories of the television sixties Tracey Moffatt give us avant gard cinematography making a stylized Australian outback mixed between real things and sets with a very beautiful and dramatical photography full of irony, humour ,suspense and tragedy; she made a very unusual films and as always with this kind of films is very hard to accept the new reality that the director propose, then after the mixed feelings regular moviegoers but just of the regular cinema that always told the same story and in the same style never creating a new world, probably could be disappointed, if you think cinema is an adventure and the approximation to new cosmovisions and of course poetry and beauty, then this is a film for you.