Director/Screenplay/Visual Effects – Ivan Sen, Producers – David Jowsey, Angela Littlejohn, Ivan Sen & Greer Simpkin, Production Design – Adam Head. Production Company – Lionsgate/Grindstone Entertainment Group/Screen Queensland/Bunya Productions/Rock Salt Releasing.
Ryan Kwanten (Jack), Jillian Nguyen (April), Hugo Weaving (Dr Bergman)
Sometime in the future. Jack works as a hired killer. While on transit, he sees and becomes attracted to April. He follows her to the club where she works as a singer that attendees can hire for private performances. He asks her if she will dine with him and the two develop an attraction. At the same time, Jack begins to feel ill and becomes aware that people are following him. He sets out in search of a missing scientist in an effort to find what is plaguing him.
Loveland was the seventh film from Ivan Sen, a half-Aborigine director from Australia. Sen emerged as director with Beneath Clouds (2002) and has gone on to other works such as Toomelah (2011), Mystery Road (2013) and Goldstone (2016), a duo of films that feature an Aborigine detective, and Limbo (2023). His one other genre work was the UFO film Dreamland (2009).
Surprisingly, Loveland is a Cyberpunk film. Ivan Sen achieves a simple but effective depiction of the future merely by going and shooting in Hong Kong. The city lends a feel that looks both futuristic and lived-in at the same time in the best Blade Runner (1982) tradition – perpetual neon everywhere, signage (mostly in Chinese) in just about every available inch of the frame, mixed with minimalist touches of advanced tech. This is the sort of effect that Cyberpunk writers are constantly expending much effort to achieve.
In the midst of this, Sen creates a melancholy love story. Another more overt Cyberpunk film would have pumped up elements such as showing Ryan Kwanten as the type of hitman he seem to be near the start or concerning the corporate agents following him, the mystery of the missing doctor and the Conceptual Breakthrough that Kwanten undergoes in mid-film where he finds who he really is and why he is feeling ill. In contrast, Sen never seems that interested in developing these aspects and focuses more on his pensive love story. The urban futurescape serve as a backdrop against which the two central characters’ internal voiceovers act as a melancholy introspection. The nearest work you are reminded of is the quasi-Cyberpunk noir of Trouble in Mind (1986).
Most mainstream viewers found Loveland slow and affectless, which it undeniably is – the pace is slow and inward-looking, nothing much happens. On the other hand, to take the perspective of how it works as a science-fiction film, it does so not too badly. In any other work, you could simply make the first half into a non-SF story film about two lonely souls connecting in a big city. However, around mid-film, there comes a fascinating and well developed twist where [PLOT SPOILERS] Ryan Kwanten discovers that he is the result of a genetic tinkering program that has made him potentially immortal, that he has escaped from his creators and become used to living without their drugs, but now having found an attraction to another individual, this is activating hormones inside him that are making him ill. In other words, he must walk away from the girl if he wants to live.
Trailer here