Perth writer/director David Vincent Smith had the audience transfixed at the preview showing of his first feature film, He Ain’t Heavy.
From its tense opening moments the film was so compelling that the viewers became totally involved in the drama of a family struggling to deal with a drug-addicted son.
Max (Sam Corbett) is desperate for money to buy drugs. He is screaming abuse as he hammers on the door while his mother Bev (Greta Scacchi) turns up the TV as she tries to drown the noise.
Max’s older sister Jade (played by Scacchi’s daughter Leila George) slips into the house to support her mother – but they are horrified when Max steals Bev’s car and roars off, only to crash the car moments later.
Jade is at breaking point, torn between love for her violent young brother and the need to make something of her own life.
Max is homeless and destitute. In a last-ditch attempt to get him free of drugs Jade tricks him into going to a deserted house owned by their late grandfather.
There she locks him in a room she has already reinforced, supplies him with food, water and painkillers and steels herself to bear his howls of pain and fury as he goes through the agony of drug withdrawal.
Her plan comes awry when her mother turns up, determined to let her boy go.
The film, anchored by raw performances from the central trio, has the ring of truth, based as it is on on a real-life crisis in the author’s own family.
The film is expanded from Smith’s short film I’m Not Hurting You, which premiered at the 2019 Sydney Film Festival and screened at numerous Australian and international film festivals.
He Ain’t Heavy opened in Sydney in June and has already won four WA Screen Culture Awards, including Outstanding Achievement in Performance for Sam Corlett, a WAAPA graduate who starred in the Netflix series Vikings: Valhalla.
Leila George, in her first major film role, was rivetting as the protective sister Jade.
Most of the filming was done in Gosnells, after Smith and his team spent six months searching for an old house in an isolated area where Max could be imprisoned. Other scenes were shot in Fremantle.
He Ain’t Heavy is now showing at Luna Leederville and Luna On SX.
Watch the trailer…
