The Quarry Reviews

An unabashedly allegorical film about race relations in South Africa, this handsomely photographed film comes up a little short in the drama department. A nameless white man (Irish actor John Lynch) is on the run, and gets a lift from a middle-aged minister (Serge-Henri Valcke), also white and en route to his new position with a church in an isolated black township. The minister makes a sexual overture to the fugitive, who rebuffs him with a beer bottle; to his horror, he realizes he's accidentally killed the older man. So he hides the body in a quarry, takes the reverend's car and assumes his identity, apparently figuring that any new life — even one ministering to hopelessly poor people in an isolated backwater — is better than his old one. But the deception doesn't go as smoothly as the fake reverend had hoped. His car is robbed by two black locals, Valentine (Oscar Petersen) and his brother Small (Jody Abrahams); it turns out that they've been growing marijuana in the quarry where the real reverend's body is hidden. When the corpse is discovered, the brothers are blamed and the fugitive is caught in an ethical dilemma: Does he clear them and implicate himself, or remain silent and let them take the rap? Though this synopsis makes the film sound like a thriller, it's not. It's a contemplative (okay, slow) meditation on guilt — real and imagined — and personal responsibility that's just a bit too oblique for its own good, rather like last year's equally abstruse and faith-oriented BROKEN GIANT.