He Ain't Heavy, the first feature film from West Australian director David Vincent Smith, begins with an attempted home invasion. On a suburban street, a man in a hoodie is shouting bloody murder, trying to kick the front door down, but the house's middle-aged occupant (Greta Scacchi) seems oddly unperturbed, drinking a cuppa at the kitchen table.
That's because she's barricaded safely inside the room; locks on the inner doors mean the house can be partitioned, as in a prison. The man outside is her son (Sam Corlett, from Netflix's Vikings: Valhalla), strung out and looking for cash.
This is not the first time the family has dealt with incidents like this; his 30-something sister (played by Leila George — Scacchi's real-life daughter with Vincent D'Onofrio) has been unable to travel or hold down relationships for fear of neglecting the latest crisis. What if she misses an urgent call and her little brother winds up dead?
So, she offers her brother money to help her clean out their grandmother's house. Once they've arrived, however, she locks him in a room she prepared earlier, with a barred window and a surveillance camera. He's going cold turkey, whether he likes it or not (he doesn't).
It's a family drama that doubles as hostage thriller, with a set-up reminiscent of horror films like Saw, in which characters are confined against their will and tortured.
"I wanted to lean into that and then subvert it," says Vincent Smith. "It's almost like kidnapping for love as opposed to kidnapping for, like, rape and murder."
'You can't just kidnap someone'
Vincent Smith grew up with 15 foster siblings. One of his brothers joined the family when he was only two days old; his mother had schizophrenia and lived on the streets. He grew into an anxious kid and the family ended up having "massive dramas" with the Department of Child Protection. Soon, Vincent Smith's brother was self-medicating with drugs and alcohol.
"You become a teenager and you don't have the responsibility and the understanding that this is not treatment for trauma," the filmmaker says.
"Then it just went chaotic. And then he spent the last 10 years of his life in and out of prison."
Vincent Smith was often torn between wanting to protect his parents and looking after his troubled brother.
"This person is in a heightened state of danger, is attacking my parents. And that was happening so often," he recalls.
"But also I understood the bigger picture. It was just a person who was really angry and upset and had no idea how to deal with that. And prison systems aren't really built to help people heal from trauma."
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I ask Vincent Smith if he ever resorted to something like locking his brother in a room — or is the scenario in the film pure wish fulfilment?
"To tell you the truth, I was driving home from a film shoot down south, kind of far away, and my Mum called, and shit was going down. Like, hectic. And I was so tired and burnt out, and it was having massive negative impacts on relationships with friends and my work and everything. I was stressed about even travelling overseas for film opportunities."
Vincent Smith was racing home along the highway when he had an idea: "I'm going to put my brother in the car — just be like, 'Come with me, I'll buy you dinner, give you 50 bucks' — and then I'm gonna load my boot of my car with food and water and I'm gonna drive out, literally, into the middle of Western Australia. In the desert."
He'd throw the car keys away and they'd spend two weeks working things out.
"That was the thought I had. By the time I got to the house, in heavy traffic, I was like, 'Do not do that'," he laughs. "You can't just kidnap someone."
That sentiment is echoed in the film, when Scacchi's character turns up and is horrified to find her son caged like an animal.
That the actors arguing for and against freeing him are played by a real mother and daughter just make their arguments more convincing.
"There were a couple of times where I could tell Greta would throw in a line and Leila was like, 'Are you talking to me as the character or talking to me?'"
Learning to talk to each other
He Ain't Heavy is an impressive first feature. It's tight, it's suspenseful and it's clear-eyed about its subject, with Vincent Smith resisting the temptation to tie things up neatly.
"At the end, I didn't really want to wrap up and provide an answer because I don't actually know the answer. And if I knew the answer, I'd just make a five-minute YouTube video and be like, 'So here's the thing'. It's too complicated and nuanced."
Vincent Smith also decided not to identify specific drugs or show drug use in the film; drug use is a symptom, not the cause.
"It's really about a family dealing with this sort of trauma and this sort of pain and an unspoken … really, it's [about] a whole bunch of people who haven't spoken honestly. And it just becomes a corrosive thing.
"I think that's really the main issue: in society at large, we haven't learned how to talk and we haven't learned how to deal with trauma. And it becomes this cancer, and it destroys people's lives."
Screening the film at both Sydney and Melbourne Film Festivals, the director has seen how it enables people to talk about their own experiences with mothers or brothers or nephews.
He realises now that his own experience isn't so uncommon.
"But what was common was not many people talking about it because of the shame."
He Ain't Heavy is in cinemas now.