Strangerland Trailer: Nicole Kidman Finds Her True Voice After 25 Years

For the past 25 years, Nicole Kidman has changed her accent for every fiction film she’s done, whether she appeared on screen or simply provided her voice for an animated character. Not counting documentary narration, Dead Calm was the last time she spoke with her native Australian tongue — even in Baz Luhrman’s Australia she feigned an English accent — until now. With her starring role in Strangerland, Kidman got to relax her vocal chords a little bit more than usual.

Except for all the screaming she apparently does in the movie, if the above trailer is any indication. She has something to yell about, of course, because her character’s two teenage kids (Madison Brown and Nicholas Hamilton) have disappeared after the family moved to a dusty new town in the middle of nowhere. Joseph Fiennes, who does get to do an accent, is Kidman’s husband. Rounding out the cast as the local cop on the case is Hugo Weaving, who is another thing Kidman hasn’t worked with in more than 25 years, since the Australian miniseries Bangkok Hilton.

Strangerland, which is the feature debut of director Kim Farrant, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. If you go by the trailer, it looks like the movie was well-received there, though the selected blurbs are from only two outlets, neither of which I’d heard of before. Meanwhile, the movie has a 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes from five critics, and our own Rob Hunter claimed it to be so boring that it threatened to stop the audience’s hearts from beating.

Here is the full synopsis of the movie from the Sundance film guide:

New to the remote Australian desert town of Nathgari, the Parker family is thrown into crisis when Catherine and Matthew discover that their two teenage kids, Tommy and Lily, have mysteriously disappeared just before a massive dust storm hits the town. With Nathgari now eerily smothered in red dust and darkness, the locals join the search led by local cop David Rae. With temperatures rising, and the chances of survival plummeting with each passing day, Catherine and Matthew find themselves pushed to the brink as they struggle to survive the uncertainty of their children’s fate.

Part thriller, part psychological drama, Strangerland erupts with talent and confident storytelling. It operates at such a high level, it is nearly impossible to believe this film is director Kim Farrant’s first feature. Enlivened by a phenomenal cast, including Nicole Kidman, who delivers one of the strongest performances of her career, Strangerland joins the ranks of Australia’s recent wave of stylish, “Elevated Genre” films and marks the emergence of another massive directing talent from Down Under.

Strangerland has US distribution but no release date yet.

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