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‘The Moogai’ Review: A Limp Australian Horror Film Made of Colonial Metaphors


The potent meaning and imagery behind Jon Bell’s tale of Aboriginal suffering, 'The Moogai,' fail to coalesce.

Stories of Australia’s “Stolen Generations” — Aboriginal children forcibly removed from their families by a white government — fuel the central metaphor in “ The Moogai,” Jon Bell ’s Sundance horror movie based on his 2020 short film. A riveting prologue, set decades in the past, orients the viewer within Australia’s torrid history, as white men in suits attempt to chase down and kidnap Black children on an Aboriginal reserve. The Moogai is frequently described as a “long-armed” creature — a reference, perhaps, to the long arm of the law — but despite the numerous loaded metaphors at the film’s disposal, this boogeyman also ends up literal in its presentation, in a way that ironically severs it from Bell’s tale of intergenerational trauma.

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