John Hillcoat makes violence feel unpleasantly ordinary, even in the harshest settings. We rate his unsentimental approach, though the writing can let him down: familiar crime plotting sometimes leaves all that suffering looking excessive.
Fi1m perspective
Hillcoat's landscapes make getting through another day look like hard work. His people face violence as a practical problem, with little comfort in the scenery, and we value the bluntness with which he puts it on screen. The confined brutality of his first feature, Ghosts... of the Civil Dead (1988), established the concern; The Proposition (2005) took it into an outback Western. Nick Cave co-wrote the former and wrote the latter, which brought Hillcoat wider critical attention.
Cave's contribution extends beyond scripts to scores and music videos, a partnership that helps explain the continuity across Hillcoat's work. Music-video directing also occupied much of the long interval between those two features. In The Road (2009), he adapted Cormac McCarthy with a realism that made the novel's world feel physically credible. The Prohibition drama Lawless (2012) and crime thriller Triple 9 (2016) took his taste for harsh material into crime stories. He has useful skills for those films: a feel for ensemble tension and an ability to keep the story moving through the violence.
Hillcoat directed Crocodile (2017) for Black Mirror (2011), a programme we recommend with a familiar reservation. We were unsettled by the series because its straight-faced performances made the distress matter even when the situations were absurd. Yet it sometimes keeps tightening the screws after the point is clear. That judgement concerns the series as a whole, rather than Hillcoat's episode in isolation, but it helps explain what we ask of his work: enough restraint to let the violence register without labouring it.
Lawless shows the corresponding risk in his feature work: tension and momentum can carry familiar plotting only so far. Its brutality can feel excessive when the script settles for formula, however firmly the atmosphere is established. We want the writing to give us as much reason to follow these people as the direction gives us to fear for them. Start with The Proposition for the Cave partnership; approach the crime films with more caution.
Biography
John Hillcoat is an Australian film and television director. Born on 14 August 1961 in Brisbane, he studied film at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne.
His early feature Ghosts... of the Civil Dead (1988) was followed by music videos for artists including Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and Depeche Mode. He directed the outback Western The Proposition (2005), written by Nick Cave, and later The Road (2009) and Lawless (2012).
Hillcoat has directed episodes of Black Mirror (2017), George & Tammy (2022–2023) and Special Ops: Lioness (2023), as well as the feature Triple 9 (2016).
