Little Fish (15) <!-- none onestar twostar threestar fourstar fivestar -->

Rowan Woods's sombre familial drama Little Fish is a movie you have to read almost entirely between the lines. This is because Jacqueline Perske's screenplay is so elliptical that what happens on screen seems to have less significance than what has happened in the past - and this film has no flashbacks. So we sit there for the first 20 minutes trying to figure out what relation this character bears to that, and whether a look signifies momentary exasperation or a lifetime's disgust.

Cate Blanchett plays Tracy, a reformed junkie working in a Sydney video store, trying to raise enough money to start up on her own. The bank won't make her the loan, however, nor can she break free of her old loyalty to Lionel (Hugo Weaving), a one-time rugby star turned full-time junkie, and to her drug-dealer ex-boyfriend Jonny (Dustin Nguyen), now returned as a stockbroker after four years in Vancouver. He also seems to be shadily in cahoots with Tracy's deadbeat brother Ray (Martin Henderson), who lost his leg in a car accident while Jonny was driving. Patrolling the margins of the plot is Sam Neill as a mild-mannered gangster fed up with carrying Lionel as his business partner.

The murkiness of the storyline is in remarkable contrast to the vividness of the performances. Blanchett, her skin almost translucently pale, is extraordinarily good as a woman just about holding it together. Her sense of grievance, edged with self-pity, feels exactly true to the type who's dragged herself up from the abyss only to find the world doesn't owe her a living. She is only slightly out-twitched by Weaving, gaunt and bearded as her old partner-in-grime, despair clinging to him like old sweat. Henderson as Ray looks like Jim Morrison in his gone-to-seed twilight, though at one point he's seen blowing out the candles on his 30th birthday cake. "Speech, Ray?" "Get fucked". It's typical of the dialogue, laconic, casually profane, very Australian, and suits Woods's tight direction.

Indeed, Little Fish plays it so close to the chest that you always feel at least a couple of beats behind it. Woods tells us the bare minimum, but as the intrigue thickens the gravitational pull of tragedy becomes irresistible. Noni Hazlehurst, as the protective mother of Tracy and Ray, eloquently conveys this realisation. What a shame, then, that the movie braces us for a big denouement and abjectly fails to deliver one. Compare it to Ray Lawrence's brilliant Lantana (2001), another multi-character drama from Australia with a complicated back story, and the difference between what each film draws out of its intricate shuffle of characters is very marked.

This serious and compelling mood-piece trawls some dark places and promises to dredge up something worth the effort; alas, it's not even little fish we're offered but a harmless old boot.