Comparisons to Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage, which was filmed by Roman Polanski as Carnage, are inevitable when viewing DISCLOSURE, written and directed by Michael Bentham.
It’s comparison in a good way, not damning it by being derivative, not to bury, but to praise.
Power couple Joel and Bec Chalmers have come to Danny and Emily Bowman’s bucolic abode in outer Melbourne’s fern tree gullies to mitigate and mediate over their son’s attack on the Bowman’s 4-year-old girl, Natasha
At first, all seems cool, calm and collected, as they discuss parenting and discipline around the pool. But the veneer of civility slips with the introduction of “button” words like victim and bully and politician Joel’s incapacity to curb taking constant calls on his mobile phone.
Manners mortared, politeness torpedoed, the discussion of the alleged assault escalates into a verbal squabble of stupendously espoused vitriol, an uncivil vomiting of contradicting convictions, a spewing of grotesque prejudices and a skewering of veiled hypocrisy.
The casting of DISCLOSURE is spot on. Matilda Ridgway as Emily Bowman and Mark Leonard Winter as Danny Bowman play the parents of the accuser while Geraldine Hakewill as Bec Chalmers and Tom Wren as Joel Chalmers portray the parents of the accused.
As the mobile phone fetishist and political manipulator, Tom Wren delivers a portrait of the very worst of opportunist, populist, pragmatic politicians, patrician and unctuous. Geraldine Hakewill is splendid in a Stepford Wife type character holed by the hypocrisy that hovers over her own troubled history.
The other couple teams two prodigious talents, in Matilda Ridgway and Mark Leonard Winter, marvelous in conveying the knife edge balancing act of maintaining a marriage, parenting and employment in tempestuous times.
Decorum and diplomacy is eroded and finally scuttled by the adults, as disclosures are weaponised, DISCLOSURE becomes a demolition derby of threat, blackmail and a spiral of adulthood into infantilism.
DISCLOSURE is available to rent on Home Entertainment Platforms from September 15
Richard Cotter