Gold  ★★½

WHAT were the makers of Australian survival thriller Gold thinking. How could they let this film be released with a glaringly obvious continuity error?

If it was just a boom mic slightly caught at the top of the screen or somebody breathing when they should be dead I could forgive it.

But there are three scenes towards the end of this 2022 release where a character’s injury clearly moves from one side of his torso to the other and back again.

I didn’t want to start the review with this aspect of what is otherwise a pretty good film, but when I sat down to write the annoyance just seemed to take over.

Filmed in a desolate area of the South Australian outback, Gold depicts the quite likely events that follow after two men find a massive gold nugget.

The setting is cryptically described as ‘somewhere slightly in the future’ but never really follows through on this choice because the plot could also have been set now or 100 years ago; the message focusing on the lengths man will go for greed are the same.

Nevertheless, director Anthony Hayes, who also appears in the film, uses the location well, particularly for the bulk of time during which we watch one character trying to physically and mentally survive the heat, sand, wild dogs and other threats.

We are used to American actor Zac Efron playing a particular type of raffish nice-guy like his character in The Greatest Showman for example, but in Gold he gives perhaps his best dramatic performance since the under-rated The Paper Boy from 2012.

Kudos also to the make-up artists who complement Efron’s intense performance with a physical transformation that resembles a body slowly decaying while still alive, almost being taken over by the elements around him.

It’s showing exclusively on the Stan streaming service and worth a watch if you don’t mind a simple story that ends abruptly. Unfortunately I have to mark it down for that error which bugged the hell out of me.