Dust Devil

In the Namibian desert of South Africa, a mysterious human predator named Hitch (Robert Burke) prowls the sands, seeking souls who yearn to die and granting them their release by murdering them. After slaying an unhappy wife, painting the walls in mystic symbols with her blood and torching her house, he encounters Wendy Robinson (Chelsea Field), who, fleeing an unhappy marriage, picks him up on the road. Meanwhile, black policeman Ben (Zakes Mokae) is investigating the bizarre murders, and learns from both a pathologist and a local tribal magician that a supernatural entity is behind them.

In her motel room, Wendy contemplates suicide, with Hitch waiting to claim her soul, but she doesn't go through with it. Her husband Mark (Rufus Swart), attempting to track her down, winds up in a roadside cafe she had visited and is beaten up by the black customers. Curious about her traveling companion, Wendy goes through Hitch's belongings and discovers a box containing severed fingers, which he claims from his victims. He then attacks her, but she flees into the desert as he pursues, reverting to his true, demonic form.

Mark has joined Ben on their trail, but an attack by Hitch cripples their jeep, and Ben handcuffs Mark to the overturned vehicle and continues alone. Hitch, Wendy, and Ben converge in a ghost town where the supernatural killer murders Ben before Wendy manages to blow his head off with a shotgun. She, however, has now become the incarnation of his spirit, and leaves the still-helpless Mark behind to pursue new victims.

DUST DEVIL is the second film from London-based South African director Richard Stanley, a graduate from music videos who made his feature debut with 1990's HARDWARE. That film took a cold, claustrophobic, tech-noir visual approach to its story of a robot run amok; this one is quite the opposite, set largely in outdoor locations and rich with color-saturated vistas, stunningly photographed by Steven Chivers. It's a switch from the usual approach to horror, which generally prefers to lead the audience into confined spaces, but it works stylistically in this context, complementing the African mythological underpinnings that run through the story. It also echoes the spare, eerie style of the cult chiller THE HITCHER (with which it shares some plot similarities), with its wide, empty vistas evoking their own feeling of isolated terror.

The film, in fact, is stronger on mood than on visceral suspense, since Stanley tells his story in a fairly leisurely fashion, with perhaps a bit too much screen time devoted to shots of characters driving from one place to another. (Stanley's original version, which played only in England, runs 20 minutes longer than this one and reportedly complemented the slight story with even richer subtexts and motivations.) The U.S. cut is also over-reliant on voiceover narration (derived from dialogue spoken onscreen in the British edition), which repeatedly explains the villain's motivations to the point of redundancy. That works at odds with Burke's cool, measured performance, which doesn't break out into full, murderous rage until close to the end, assisted by strong makeup effects work.

The other actors are in good form, but the movie's real star remains its look, and its evocation of a land where a nomadic shapeshifter can roam, seeking victims who, deep in their souls, welcome the release from life he can bring, however violent that release may be. (Graphic violence, nudity, sexual situations, profanity.) leave a comment