Watching Before Dawn, it is quickly obvious that this first world war drama didn’t have a budget big enough to stage blockbuster scale battlefield recreations – instead, there’s plenty of scenes following characters inside trenches, the camera poised below ground level. Director Jordan Prince-Wright exploits the restricted spatiality of these settings, often keeping shots tight and human-oriented, with scant locational details. The cover of night also helps. It reportedly cost $900,000 in earthworks to dig the trenches, transforming farmland in Esperance, Western Australia, into environments that can plausibly – at a push – resemble terrain in war-torn Europe.
The marketing materials for Before Dawn do a good job impersonating a bells-and-whistles production but the film itself is another matter: there were times, particularly early on, when I couldn’t help but think, “These are just actors performing in a hole in the ground.” You can feel Prince-Wright and his cast and crew bending over backwards to achieve things better resourced productions pull off much more easily, giving the experience a slight tang of desperation, and perhaps diverting attention from areas where it needed work – such as the script, which brings nothing really new to the table and lacks a compelling arc.
