This beloved character – a fixture of our national cinema and literature – is a gregarious human-loving bird, preferring to point his long schnoz in the direction of people rather than the water. We observe his young self fostering motherless baby pelicans, one of whom becomes the family pet, Mr Percival. But, as the grown-up Kingley explains to his granddaughter, the conversations between them forming a bedtime story framing device, “one day the world came to me.” That past involves Kingley as a child (the fresh-faced Finn Little, who has great presence) living on Ninety Mile beach with his father Tom (Jai Courtney, delivering a fine performance as a reserved but not unemotional man).įather and son are cut off off from the world. Seet and the cinematographer Bruce Young (who recently shot the excellent Blue Murder: Killer Cop and the laughable Bite Club) indulge in fish-eye style compositions, with blurry edges that evoke a dreamy past. It is a strikingly surreal opener, with a rich cinematic texture that comes and goes throughout the rest of the film. The room’s floor-to-ceiling glass window shatters and everybody exits except for Kingley, who, as if in trance, walks towards it, noticing a pelican outside perched on a light post. There are intense grey clouds, rumblings of thunder and heavy rain. In a meeting room high up in the building, Kingley observes a grey and foreboding metropolis – starkly contrasting the glistening aqua water and silky sand dunes of Coorong, South Australia, where much of the film is based. Photograph: Matt Nettheim/Stormy Productions Morgana Davies and Geoffrey Rush in a scene from Storm Boy.

Cast of storm boy