"David Easteal’s THE PLAINS is one of the best things I’ve seen this year: a commuter road movie in which standard lives fascinate through magnification and repetition, small talk telling large stories as the windscreen’s drab highway vistas reveal urban histories." - Guy Lodge on Twitter (critic for Variety, The Observer, The Guardian)
"The humdrum becomes slowly and cumulatively fascinating across the three hours of Australian David Easteal's quietly radical feature-length debut The Plains." - Neil Young, Screen International
"The film plays like a straight-up fly-on-the-wall documentary, the slow drip-feed of information accumulating into a moving portrait of everyday resilience against the crushing tedium of existence." - Alistair Harkness, Scotsman
This off-the-radar contender for Film of 2022 takes place almost entirely within a car, has an unorthodox duration, and characters whom we only half-see. Yet it’s extraordinary. Sometimes a car can be an ad-hoc ‘honesty booth’; two passengers together yet apart, spared from eye contact. The Plains plays with this ‘car-confessional’ but leans away from escalating psychodrama, and towards the much greater, subtler pathos that bubbles up around extended chats between a jaded commuting suburban Melbourne lawyer and his occasional younger passenger, plus mysterious disembodied images of the Australian bush. A unique docu-drama hybrid.
