Kangaroo Island (2024) [Movie review]

Kangaroo Island just ended a limited theatrical run and is now on VOD.

Now on VOD · US Theatrical April 24, 2026 · Blue Harbor Entertainment

The talent agency tells Lou Wells they are just not excited by her anymore. This is the kind of sentence that hits with the specific weight of something everyone involved already knew but nobody had said out loud, and the scene where Lou receives it in a Los Angeles that has never been less glamorous is where Kangaroo Island earns its first real feeling.

Lou Wells is not excited by Lou Wells either. She is broke, her ex is asking her to move out of the apartment they share, her friends are keeping a careful distance. When her estranged father sends her a plane ticket home to South Australia she accepts it because there is nothing left in Los Angeles requiring her to stay.

The island she returns to is, depending on the moment, either the most beautiful place on the Australian coast or a landscape specifically engineered to make everything she is carrying feel worse by contrast. Timothy David’s feature debut understands that a setting this visually powerful is a double-edged tool, that placing a family drama about secrets and inheritance and love gone wrong against a backdrop of coastal perfection can either feel like counterpoint or like cruelty, and the film moves between both registers with enough control that neither one dominates. Most of the time.

Lou Wells Is the Kind of Character Rebecca Breeds Was Made to Play and Hasn’t Had Enough Chances to

Rebecca Breeds has spent her career in projects that used her well without quite fully using her. Clarice gave her the bones of an iconic character and a cancellation. What Kangaroo Island gives her is messier and smaller and considerably more hers: a woman who has been circling failure for long enough that the circling has become a personality, who returns home with every defensive armor she owns deployed, and who spends the film’s first hour refusing to let the island or the people on it reach her before the second hour quietly dismantles every position she has taken.

Breeds plays Lou’s emotional exhaustion with the specific quality of someone who knows exactly how she is coming across and has stopped caring enough to change it. There is a flatness in her early scenes that is not a performance of emptiness but a performance of someone performing okayness, and Breeds locates the precise register where those two things diverge. The Film Critics Circle of Australia nomination for Best Actress is not a surprise.

Adelaide Clemens as Freya, the sister who stayed, is the film’s most complicated emotional presence. Freya is religious in ways the film treats as genuine rather than as shorthand for rigidity, which is the more generous and more dramatically interesting choice. She has been given the family farm by their father in what Lou experiences as a betrayal and what Freya experiences as recognition for the one who did not leave.

Clemens plays the moral architecture of Freya’s position, the certainty and the defensiveness and the grief underneath both, with enough layers that the film never allows the sister dynamic to collapse into the simpler version of itself it could easily become. Her nomination for Best Supporting Actress is also not a surprise.

Erik Thomson’s Rory is the still point around which the family drama organizes itself. Terminally ill, carrying secrets, possessing the specific quality of a man who loved his daughters in ways that consistently made things worse, he is the character whose choices the film is really about even though he is not the character the film follows most closely.

Thomson plays him without self-pity and without the kind of redemptive sentimentality that dying-parent narratives often reach for. He is simply a man who made certain decisions and is now watching their consequences arrive together while he does not have enough time left to address them individually.

Joel Jackson as Ben, Lou’s ex who is now married to Freya, has the film’s most structurally difficult role. He is required to exist as the love triangle’s third point while also being a genuine person with his own perspective on what happened and what is happening now. Jackson manages this with more grace than the screenplay consistently earns for him, particularly in the scenes where Ben and Lou have to be in the same room and the film is trusting the actors to communicate everything the dialogue is not saying.

The Island Itself Is Doing a Specific Kind of Work That Deserves Its Own Accounting

Kangaroo Island is one of the most photographed places in South Australia and there is a reason for this that has nothing to do with tourism boards. The coastline has a quality that is both dramatically scaled and somehow intimate, the kind of landscape that makes you feel simultaneously small and exactly the right size. Ian McCarroll’s cinematography gives the island the respect of actually looking at it rather than using it as decoration, and the film’s outdoor sequences have a visual honesty that the more cramped interior family scenes benefit from by contrast.

The island’s presence in the film is not incidental. The people who stayed built their lives in relation to it, which means every scene is lit by the specific quality of light that belongs to that coastline and scored by the specific quality of silence that belongs to an island where the nearest city requires a ferry. Ariel Marx’s score works with that silence rather than against it, finding the precise register between the film’s emotional heaviness and the formal restraint that Timothy David is working toward throughout.

The working title was Animal, which is interesting to sit with. The family dynamics that Kangaroo Island documents are not subtle ones: the competing claims on inheritance and love and the right to have left and the right to have stayed are all operating at a volume the characters are mostly trying to modulate and occasionally cannot. What David and screenwriter Sally Gifford do with this material is resist the Lifetime movie version of it that the premise makes available at every turn.

The euthanasia subplot, the car accident, the revelation of the farm’s ownership, the love triangle that operates in plain sight of everyone while nobody formally names it, these are all the ingredients of melodrama deployed with a restraint that keeps them from tipping into it. Usually.

Where the Film Gets Away From Itself and Why That Does Not Undercut What It Gets Right

Kangaroo Island has too much in it. This is the honest accounting. The screenplay is trying to hold more threads simultaneously than its 110 minutes can develop to the depth each one deserves, and the euthanasia subplot in particular arrives with a weight that the surrounding film has not quite built the structural capacity to absorb. Some of the family confrontation scenes reach for resolution faster than the dramatic architecture beneath them has earned, and there are moments in the second half where the film’s desire to give everyone something to carry becomes visible as a screenwriting decision rather than a lived truth.

None of this undoes what the performances are doing. The specific thing Kangaroo Island achieves, which is a family drama that takes its characters seriously enough to give them genuine moral positions rather than positions designed to be dismantled by the narrative, is the achievement that the Film Critics Circle of Australia nominations are recognizing.

Lou is not wrong to feel what she feels about the farm. Freya is not wrong to feel what she feels about Lou’s absence. Rory is not wrong to love them both in the way he loves them and not entirely wrong to have made the choices he made. These are not positions the film is going to adjudicate. It is just going to put them in a room together and let the island light fall on all of them equally.

Timothy David won Best First-Time Filmmaker at the Montreal Independent Film Festival for work that demonstrates something specific: he understands the difference between a film that is about difficult things and a film that is difficult, and he has made the former. Kangaroo Island is not a punishment to watch. It is often genuinely funny in ways that arrive without announcement, and the humor when it comes is the kind that belongs to people who have known each other long enough that cruelty and affection become genuinely indistinguishable. That balance is harder to achieve than it looks, and the film achieves it more often than the overcrowded second half would suggest at first contact.

Kangaroo Island is now available on VOD in the United States via Blue Harbor Entertainment.