Friday One Sheet: LIMBO

The pull quotes filling the open sky here say as much about the film as they do about Australian Carnival Studio's design ethos for the film's key art. Ivan Sen's striking, monochrome new cold case, outback noir Limbo is a firmly coiled spring. One that is held perfectly in, well, limbo, via the landscape, the architecture, the characters and their situations being placed intentionally in every frame.

Fitting for a film about crime, and race, and truth, Limbo is a film where nothing is black and white, and yet everything is black and white. Mountains, or rather piles of dirt, dot the landscape from the many open-pit opal mines, exposed for all to see. The resulting (or perhaps remaining) holes, and deep shafts, go the other way, hiding past truths.

The title card, in manual typewriter typesetting, sits just above the horizon, suspended as it were in the thing it represents. Meanwhile, the credit block sits unobtrusively near Simon Baker's feet. Meanwhile, a beautiful black Chrysler sits in a diagonal line to where he is standing -- which intersects the road out of (or into) where he is.

The kind of careful, deliberate, placement in this key art is also the essence of the film. It serves as an indicator of both the tone, and the drama, and it is starkly beautiful besides.