Jared leads a cool life as a surfer in Blackrock, on the Australian coast. His best friend Rico returns after a year and throws a party, during which Jared, walking along the beach for a breath of fresh air, witnesses the gang rape of a fifteen-year-old girl of his acquaintance. At first, paralysed with horror, he is rooted to the spot for an instant, before running away. The following day the girl's body is discovered. National TV descends on the little coastal town, the police seem to have their suspicions already, and Jared becomes nervous: after all, we was seen going to the beach. But he still cannot just betray his friends, even though he is plagued by a guilty conscience for not having helped the girl...

• Let us, to begin our series My Best Friend the Rapist, dive straight into cold Australian waters. It can only get better after this.

Our "hero" Jared remains inert, even though he knows, or at least thinks he does, everything. He has a guilty conscience because he did not save the girl, but Queer View readers will have no sympathy for him. Moments of shock can make people freeze and then run away. Maybe it is understandable that, directly following such an experience, a person might not know what to do. But what debut feature-film director Steve Vidler has to offer us in the way of drawn-out inner conflict goes way beyond the limits of acceptability.

A 15-year-old girl has been brutally gang-raped. She has been killed.

Jared saw it, Jared says nothing. Even his own mother thinks he might have done it. Jared still says nothing. The audience, by now, expects that the film is coming to the point where some sort of catalyst will be needed to make him open his mouth. We do get a catalyst when we discover that Jared's best friend Ricko was also at the scene, and when the girl ran, or rather staggered, into his arms for help after the gang rape, Ricko took this as the perfect opportunity to have a go at her himself before killing her, which still doesn't bother him too much.

This is human scum in its worst colours. Of course, he also demands Jared's friendship. Although their friendship is now over, Jared still tells no-one, right up to the inevitable showdown.

This Queer View editor sits in her cinema seat, unable to believe that she has been force-fed this insidious chauvinistic trash, parading as one of the great Oceanic feminist films of recent years, right to the bitter end – the 'bitter end' being not the showdown, but the partly frenetic applause from the festival audience. Were they all able to put themselves in the protagonist's shoes, a protagonist one finds quite repellent? Oh, I forgot, we live in a patriarchal society, where rape is only considered bad because it is a crime, like mugging. "I just wanted to screw her," to quote the film; presumably a large proportion of the audience could identify with that.

ki, Park City – Berlin
translation: andrew

Queer Watchlion

Deutsche Fassung

Desolated Slaves to Black Souls
In three films young men have demands put on their friendships by rapists.

My Best Friend, the Rapist, Part II: Desolation Angels
My Best Friend, the Rapist, Part III: Slaves to the Underground