Noise (2007)

A compelling performance by Brendan Cowell and award-winning sound design distinguish Matthew Saville’s 2007 slow-burn psychological drama.

Already an established director, Matthew Saville made his feature film debut in 2007 with Noise, an absorbing psychological drama that belied his career as a director of TV series drama and sketch comedy (The Secret Life of Us, Hamish & Andy, Big Bite). Saville has maintained a distinctive career in television (Please Like Me) while intermittently returning to feature film terrain, as he did in 2015 with A Month Of Sundays.

In Noise (as in his later feature, which Saville also wrote), he is skilfully attuned to exploring the inner states of troubled characters whose anxieties run deep. Police officer Graham McGahan (Brendan Cowell) is diffident, feeling at odds and afflicted with tinnitus, which exacerbates his niggling sense of isolation and estrangement from those around him. He is stationed in a police van in Melbourne’s western suburbs for a fortnight by an unsympathetic superior after a murder rocks the local community, but unexpectedly finds himself following a separate line of enquiry involving a young woman, Lavinia (Maia Thomas), struggling with her own trauma.