Films are often praised for being visually interesting, but rarely for being verbally interesting – in fact vococentrism is often discouraged, particularly through the famous screenwriting dictum “show, don’t tell”. Director Aaron Wilson’s absorbing period drama Little Tornadoes, however, manages a very compelling and unusual blend of pictures and an almost novelistic screenplay – the kind one might expect from Australian author Christos Tsiolkas, who co-wrote it with Wilson.
Assisted by the timeless qualities of rural locations, Wilson and the talented cinematographer Stefan Duscio (whose striking work includes The Dry, Upgrade and Acute Misfortune) illustrate an early 1970s Aussie setting with an eye for lived-in period details. In tone and setting, Little Tornadoes couldn’t be further from an ostentatious historical piece, bunkering down as it does into the life of an intensely glum protagonist, Leo (Mark Leonard Winter), who works as a metal worker in a small town and struggles to deal with his wife suddenly leaving him to raise their two young children alone.
