By: Nicola Heath 

Birdeater is the latest Australian horror film to wow international audiences. (Supplied: Umbrella Entertainment)

A group of friends gets together for a weekend in the country to celebrate one of their forthcoming nuptials.

It’s a bucks party in the bush with booze, drugs and a blow-up doll — what could go wrong?

Well, plenty, as shown in the new Australian horror flick, Birdeater.

It’s the debut feature film from Sydney-based friends Jack Clark and Jim Weir, who told ABC RN’s The Screen Show that many of the film’s details were inspired by real life.

Clark, who attended a Sydney private school, says: “There are definitely parts of it that are … fragments of stories or often moments of parties that we wanted to re-create. There were never whole images of people, but we definitely stole wholesale from people in our social circles.”

In Birdeater, Mackenzie Fearnley and Shabana Azeez play Louie and Irene, a young couple who meet on a Sydney beach and soon become engaged.

As their relationship unfolds on screen, however, we can’t help but notice something is awry.

Just what that is slowly comes to light as the action shifts to Louie’s bucks party — a notorious setting for antisocial behaviour.

“The whole idea [of a bucks party] is: ‘Let’s partake in this bad behaviour together and thereby excuse all of us,'” Clark says.

Jack Clark and Jim Weir pictured on location during filming for Birdeater.(Supplied: Umbrella Entertainment)

Only, in Birdeater, Louie takes the “super modern” step of inviting Irene and his friend’s girlfriend, Grace.

The result is a disturbing re-evaluation of contemporary masculinity that explores issues including emotional abuse and coercive control.

“It’s … reflective of a national male identity that’s perhaps in crisis,” Clark says.

Patterns of manipulative behaviour

Louie comes across as an archetypal nice guy, but that doesn’t make him harmless.

Seemingly nice guys often get away with hurting other people because they conceal their actions behind a pleasant façade, Weir says.

“It’s a pattern of subtly manipulative behaviour that you can only really observe over time,” he adds.

“That’s what we were trying to explore in the film — we have characters who when you meet them, you’re like, ‘OK, this guy’s trouble. This is the guy you have to worry about.’ And those are the guys that end up being total non-threats.”

In Louie, Clark and Weir wanted to create a character who was relatable, likeable and convincing in his protestations that his bad behaviour was just a big misunderstanding — he’s a nice guy, after all.

“You often find in films like these that talk about masculinity that there’s a distancing effect. There is a point in which a male audience can draw a line and then distance themselves from that character,” Clark says.

The filmmakers wanted Louie (played by Mackenzie Fearnley, pictured) to be a character the audience naturally sided with.(Supplied: Umbrella Entertainment)

But male audiences don’t get to distance themselves from Louie. Rather than a caricature of toxic masculinity, he’s drawn from the filmmakers’ thoughts, experiences and relationships — “our own worst mental gymnastics”, as Clark puts it.

The filmmakers knew that the film’s success hinged on the plausibility of Irene and Louie’s relationship, despite his problematic behaviour.

They cast Shabana Azeez (In Limbo) in the role of Irene first.

“She needed to have that immediate chemistry with someone who could essentially trap her in this relationship,” Clark says.

Mackenzie Fearnley (Operation Buffalo) provided that spark.

“As soon as she read opposite Mackenzie, she came and told us straight away, ‘That was it. That was the first time I felt like I could actually fall for what somebody is telling me. I felt like he was telling me the truth,'” Clark says.

The chemistry between Azeez (pictured, with Ben Hunter as Dylan in the background) and Fearnley was “essential”, Clark says.(Supplied: Umbrella Entertainment)

The casting of Louie’s friends Charlie (Jack Bannister) and Dylan (Ben Hunter) was equally strategic.

Clark says he wanted to present the trio of high school mates as a homogenous unit of young, white, privileged men.

“We knew they all should look similar … and everybody else in the ensemble would be othered from them in some sense, whether or not it was their gender, their [sexual] orientation, their social position, their height,” he says.

An homage to 70s classic Wake in Fright

Clark and Weir both first encountered the 1971 cult Australian horror film, Wake in Fright, while at the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS), where they met.

“It was a real kind of seminal watch,” Weir says.

He describes the film — a classic of Australian New Wave cinema directed by Canadian director Ted Kotcheff, about a teacher getting stuck in a remote outback mining town after accruing a bad gambling debt — as a “subconscious” influence on Birdeater.

“We wrote the film and went through pretty much all the pre-production without mentioning Wake in Fright once,” he says.

The film’s influence became more explicit when shooting started and Weir brought in his own Wake in Fright poster — normally pinned to his bedroom wall — to use as a prop to decorate a character’s apartment.

“[At that point] we did realise how much we had unconsciously taken from Wake in Fright,” he says.

Both films place urban professionals in unfamiliar settings far from the city.

Wake in Fright was filmed in the arid landscape surrounding Broken Hill (and famously featured graphic footage of a real-life kangaroo hunt), while Birdeater takes the claustrophobic bush surrounding the village of St Albans in the Hawkesbury as its setting.

Weir says the Birdeater budget was “very low — a few hundred thousand”.(Supplied: Umbrella Entertainment)

And both films cast a critical eye over toxic male behaviour.

Wake in Fright calls on archetypes of masculinity, such as the lone cowboy or the drover, that held sway over the 20th century and shaped our national identity, Clark says.

“Our ideals about mateship, about camaraderie, our sense of humour, our sense of irony — a lot of it stemmed from that [archetype],” he says.

However, Clark believes our ideas around masculinity have changed with the times, and millennial and gen Z audiences no longer see themselves in films like Wake in Fright.

“That man no longer seems to have a place in contemporary gender [and identity] politics,” he says.

“[We were trying to] reckon with that image [of masculinity] in today’s youth.”