Mostly well-made and taut in its tension, "The Square" is an Australian crime story that deals in adultery, money and murder. If that sounds like "Double Indemnity," my all-time favorite of similar movies, well, so be it. Nash Edgerton's direction gives the tale proper pacing, but the screenplay, by his brother, Joel and Matthew Dabner, is flawed and the scurrilous characters allow little relief, compounded by their heavy Australian accents and the fact that a lot of them seem to look alike.
Ray (David Roberts), a successful building contractor, is having an affair with Carla (Claire van der Boom), who may truly love her lover, or perhaps she's using him as a way out of a backwater town and a dead-end marriage to a boorish, violent, minor-league criminal. And then she discovers that her husband has somehow come into a large sum of cash. She makes a few withdrawals from her new-found bank, and she and Ray plot to find a future somewhere else. To cover their tracks, they hire an arsonist who shows more ethics than anyone else in movie and it's a fine piece of acting by Joel, the writing half of the Edgerton team.
Of course things go awry, as they always do, and so does the movie. It becomes filled with strange coincidences, a terrified expression on Roberts' face, stunts with heavy equipment and the like.
Opens today at the Tivoli
–Jo