John Hillcoat's Ghosts of the Civil Dead Review

With John Hillcoat’s The Proposition hitting North American screens it seems a good time to return to the Australian director’s first collaboration with musician and script writer Nick Cave. Though his debut feature is radically different from his later work in many respects Ghosts of the Civil Dead is very clearly the work of the same man. Though Ghosts has no narrative story line to speak of and its claustrophobic prison sets are in stark contrast to the barren expanses of the outback in The Proposition it shares a cold burning intensity and almost stately motion towards an inevitable eruption of violence with that film.