Wolf Creek is a 2005 Australian horror film from writer-director Greg McLean, and it's the one that turned John Jarratt's Mick Taylor into one of the most recognisable villains this country has put on screen. The setup is dead simple. Three backpackers, two English women and an Australian bloke, are driving across the outback when their car dies near the Wolf Creek crater. A cheery local named Mick offers to tow them back to his camp and sort the car out. He does not sort the car out. What he does instead is drug them, split them up, and hunt them across the middle of nowhere for his own entertainment.

First thing I'll say, and I say this as someone who lives here: I have never heard this much broad Australian accent in a single movie. It's relentless. And that's by design, because the whole engine of this film is Mick Taylor as the dark flipside of Crocodile Dundee. He's got the same easygoing charm and bushman patter that made the friendly Aussie larrikin an international export, except McLean twists it into something predatory. That inversion is the smartest thing the film does. You spend the first stretch almost liking the bloke, which makes it so much worse when the mask comes off.

The cast is the other real strength. Everyone does solid work, but the thing I keep coming back to is how convincing the fear felt once Mick drops the act. When these characters panic, it doesn't read as actors hitting their marks. It reads as people scared out of their minds, and that sells the back half of the film more than any of the violence does.

Now my honest issue with it. I'd heard about Wolf Creek for years before I actually sat down to watch it, and the reputation is enormous. People talk about it like it's the kind of film that reorganises your brain and steals your sleep for a week. So I went in fully braced for that, and what I got was a fair bit tamer than the hype suggested. It's a slow burn that keeps its on-screen body count small and leans on tension and isolation more than wall-to-wall brutality. That's a legitimate way to build a horror film, but it does mean the terror never climbed to the level I'd been promised. I wanted it to go harder and dig deeper than it did. The legend that's grown around this thing over two decades wrote a cheque the movie couldn't quite cash for me.

Where it wins is economy. This is a short, lean film and it never wastes your time. By the end, only one of the three backpackers survives, Mick gets his notorious "head on a stick" moment, and he's never caught. He just strolls off into the sunset with his rifle, free to do it all again. It's a properly bleak finish and I appreciated that it didn't go hunting for a tidy, comforting resolution. The bad guy wins, and that takes some nerve.