Gold (2022)

In some near, post-economic/post-ecological collapse future, a forever nameless Man (Zac Efron), is on his way from what’s left of a city to a supposedly golden opportunity for work in a camp somewhere in the deepest desert that once was the countryside. He’s got a kind of rideshare arrangement with another man without a name, let’s call him Man Two (Anthony Hayes), for in the grim future of 2040 (or thereabout, I presume), everybody’s too tired and cranky to have a name. Also, as every film school student will tell you, not giving your characters names means they are stand-ins for the human condition; therefore. existentialism can ensue.

On their ride through the big nowhere, the men (or would that be Men?) stumble upon a humungous chunk of gold. So huge is it, they’ll need heavier machinery to dig it out and cart it away than a nearly broken-down car. Man Two thinks he can provide; Man Two talks Man into staying with the chunk while he gets said heavy machinery in by using the old con-man reverse psychology style of “I don’t think you can stand staying here”. So Man stays to protect their find, in case some roaming heavy machinery operator drives through the middle of nowhere.

Turns out he’s really not the ideal candidate for spending time with barely enough resources to survive in the desert. He’s got a particular talent for wasting water. It certainly doesn’t help there that Man Two – who at least left a satellite phone – takes much longer for his job than expected, so that Man’s water and food rations are shrinking rapidly even without him not being a great survivalist.

Add to this natural dangers like sandstorms, wild dogs that seem to be rather better at desert survival than our Man, and an encounter with a strange but rude wanderer (Susie Porter), and things don’t look great for Man, neither physically, nor mentally, nor, as it turns out, ethically. Why, it’s as if he has been set up. Not surprisingly, the credits feature Nick Cave’s version of “People Ain’t No Good”.

Which is the first and only joke Anthony Hayes’s Gold makes, and it is a rather good one, particularly after ninety minutes of people being horrible to each other, nature not being much nicer, and everyone being doomed by a script that writes them so.

Which isn’t a criticism of the film’s tone, mind you, for it clearly wants to argue for the human condition as being an incessant, pointless drag from cradle to grave, exacerbated by the global and local results of our own greed and stupidity, and that everyone is a total shit – human and animal alike. In this world view and movie, our slightly less horrible Man is quite obviously doubly doomed; and not just doomed to die but first to suffer, then suffer, then suffer some more, become as morally corrupt as the rest of the world, suffer some more, and then die horribly. So, cheery stuff, really. It’s just not quite as convincing as it should be because the script does so obviously strain to get the character into his predicament and keep him there you might come to the conclusion everything’s quite as bad as it is not because of nature (human and otherwise) but because the writers want it to be thusly.

Hayes stages this with some flair, using the desert location as yet another way to strengthen the plot’s nihilistically oppressive mood, dwarfing Efron’s character through sheer emptiness. The further Efron’s basically sympathetic character falls into suffering and despondency, the more hallucinatory things become, but never so much as to suggest any actual spiritual element or the possibility of any transcendence – or even just development - through suffering. The only thing suffering gets you in this one is getting ripped apart by a pack of wild dogs, while some asshole watches and chuckles.