They Didn't Do Anything Wrong, Really.

There are all types of 'what if's'. What if the body found was the killer's, whose identity no one had any idea of? Maybe he drank poison, from guilt. The point is the act wasn't premeditated, they weren't killers, they panicked and did what they thought was best-- not necessarily 'right', if anyone's qualified to be a judge of right or wrong. Then, the righteous town-folk treated them like less than human. That's kind of ironic.

It wasn't about a fishing trip, it was more meditative than a couple guys pounding beers.

And maybe they would have continue the trip had it been their friend. You don't know necessarily what effect grief or heavy emotion can have on a person's equilibrium, in such a situation.

I think in life it's not what you done but what you do. They might have been stupid, wrong, but the actions of their peers were worse.

An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way -Buk

Excellent point. I agree with you.

I think one of the things that makes this film less easy to react to for Americans is that it's undercurrents of racism don't seem as obvious to us. My experiences with my Australian friends leads me to believe that theirs is still a largely segregated society and closer to the American South of the mid 1960s than it is to present day American race relations. They don't have whites only drinking fountains but there'sd a real Us and them attitude in areas with large populations of "abo's" as I hear aboriginals refered to (when they aren't calling them "Blacks").

I'm not familair with the story this is based on ( "So Much Water So Close to Home" but I would assume it's set in the American South and the filmmaker translated the story to rural Australia.

The question of whether or not they did anything wrong is not answered in any one way in the film on purpose. rather, the director and writer simply show you who thinks it was wrong and why. The focus of the story is on Laura Linney's character who is an outsider bringing american values to the incident. She wants to do what is so common these days in the USA - make a public gesture, sing kumbyaya, hold hands and make it all better. That she seemingly can't do that and can't interest anyone else in doing that spurs her on to a deeper exploration of her unease. It's just as easy and tempting to judge her for her clomping around like an insensitive lout, poking her finger into the wounds caused by the event and her husband's seemingly callous treatment of the corpse.

I was pleased with the ending. I thought it was going to go somewhere much darker. Did anybody else think that was where it was heading?

I thought that having left her husband, nobody would think to look for her if she met up with that maniac and ultimately wound up in the river herself.

"I do think, at the least, that the man who killed the girl did wrong - are you saying he was right to kill her?"

Are you asking me? If so, of course it was wrong.

It's been hammered into our heads here in America - well, mine, anyway - by the overabundance of crime shows on TV that when you come on a crime scene you

1) Don't disturb anything so as not to compromise the evidence, and
2) Notify the authorities immediately.

I could not believe that Gabriel Byrne's character touched the body at all. He should have left it alone, not moved it, not tethered it, not changed ANYTHING about it, and called the police.

But that's not what happened, is it? Even so, I don't think the four friends' inaction warranted the reaction they received from their wives and girlfriends and the other townspeople. They were simply negligent, possibly somewhat selfish.

What about the killer? He never gets found out. What about the police? They didn't try too hard to find the killer. How about sending a little rage their way?

I don't think the four were racist or sexist, regardless of accusations along those lines. I don't think it would have mattered to them if the dead person were white or a boy. They didn't want to interrupt their long-awaited fishing trip, that's all. Judging by their reactions, the body had already decomposed some, enough to stink anyway, and there wasn't a whole lot they could do to help at that point. I wish at least one of them had said something like that out loud. That seemed a reasonable enough attitude, if they weren't going to drop everything and spring into action. If only he hadn't tethered the body with fishing line, leaving obvious damage, they could have just lied about when they discovered the body, saying they found it on Sunday and called the police as soon as they got to their cars. But noooooooo ...

Someone mentioned being satisfied with the ending. If you're talking about our "heroes" attending the memorial and, after some inital resentment, being more or less welcomed, then sure, OK, that was nice. But they still had to sit on their side of the clearing without really being accepted. And nothing ever happened to the killer, except getting stung by a wasp. The story was unresolved - very frustrating. I felt very let down by this.

If this were the X-Files or The Twilight Zone, he would have been allergic to the sting and died a horrible painful death. That would have helped make this movie worthwhile. As it is, there's an awful lot of nothing going on here.

I have been in that area and it's days drive to anywhere. There is no indigenous community it's a park you have to pay to into that whole area. Building a fire would get you arrested. It is a film not a documentary. It is also aboriginal not to talk about the dead at all. So all the sub text and moral high ground is anachronistic.

They definitely 110% did the wrong thing and anyone who says otherwise has no sense of morality or compassion. What they did was heinous.