Why would anyone make such a tedious slab of misery? Van Diemen’s Land tracks eight convicts as they escape a camp on the coast of what is now Tasmania and strike inland, where they are immed­iately subsumed into endless forest, hopelessly lost and unable to find any food. They eventually turn to eating each other. You’d think cannibalism would lend drama to any movie, but Van Diemen’s Land is slow, trudging and without excitement of any kind. So weighed down is it with its sense of its own worthiness that even the murders do nothing to break the monotony. All the characters are unpleasant, and the most interesting is the first to be killed off, the rest blending into one bearded, mud-splattered doom-merchant. The misanthropy seeps into the viewer like the interminable rain; or septicæmia.

Van Diemen’s Land is based on the true story of one Alexander Pearce and quite possibly his experience of escape and cannibal­ism was this dreary, but just because it was real doesn’t make the experience worth reliving. Pearce was forced into it when he fled Hell on Earth – nothing should induce less troubled viewers to follow him.