Ellis Park review – prioritises heart over clarity

Therapy, as we know, can take a number of different forms. For Australian multi-instrumentalists and Nick Cave cohort, Warren Ellis, this process of self-enrichment encompasses a wildlife sanctuary for abused animals in Sumatra. Filmmaker Justin Kurzel captures Ellis’s musical theorising and grey-beard musings and then contextualises them against a trip to the titular park where we meet Femke den Haas and her team of caretakers, whose process of healing and being healed by the animals parallels the subject’s own self-care methods while also forming the film’s central thesis.

Yet, in presenting these parallel subjects, Ellis Park is a mixed success. Its raw materials – Ellis with his eccentric and energetic performances, the animals with their fragile lives – are its biggest strengths sonically, aesthetically and intellectually. For a while, just letting these elements exist on camera is sufficient for pleasure. Though flaws in Kurzel’s method of presentation soon become apparent, specifically in his attempts to be spontaneous and cinematically pristine in the same breath. His camera explores spaces in haphazard, documentary-style movements, while the cinematic depth of field stays claustrophobically fixed on about ten percent of the frame. 

The connection between Ellis’s troubled past and that of the animals at best doesn’t seem properly worked out, and at worst seems overstated. By his own admission, Ellis’s problems are rather small in comparison to those of, say, Rina the monkey who lives with no arms (the real star of the film), so it’s hard to see how the two can’t easily be equated. This must mean that one is being applied to the other: either the animals are given human dignity by being likened to him, or he is likened to them to justify his own development. The significant prejudice in run-time towards Ellis reflects this, and given the valuable empathy of the time that is devoted to the animals, this seems a shame. Rather than connecting, the two elements collide.