An Australian fighter pilot is shot down over Singapore in 1942, and awakens suspended in the treetops in this survival thriller. As night gives way to day, he navigates dangerous jungle and hostile forces in search of sanctuary. Based on a collection of true stories gathered by debut writer-director Aaron Wilson from Australian veterans.
"Jim (Khan Chittenden) must fend for himself - until he literally runs into a Singapore-Chinese resistance fighter, Seng (Mo Tzu-Yi), who has also been injured and is also lost. The men realise that their only hope of surviving lies with each other... There is no exposition, no politics, no conventional character development. Just these two men, this jungle, and this desperate struggle to make it through.
"Given that Jim and his new ally share no common language, the film is nearly wordless - although it is anything but silent. The fecund jungle is alive with the drone of insects and the rattle and caw of birds. Bombers drop their payloads into the distant bush. Jim's boots slap through the muck as he traipses along, panting, and without direction." (Toronto International Film Festival)
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75%24 reviews
Abandoning traditional narrative in favour of a formally experiential endeavour, Aaron Wilson’s ambitiously minimalist Canopy yields qualities both oblique and visceral as it tracks the efforts of an unnamed Australian airman (Khan Chittenden) to survive the rainforests of war-ravaged 1942 Singapore after being shot down.
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Ravishingly shot first feature... The aural landscape here is key, as Wilson’s strategy is to create a visual theater of the mind in which the majority of the action is heard and not seen.
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Lack of character development especially weakens the film's second half... quite well-managed on a technical level, but the inside of Chittenden's head never seems like an interesting place to be.
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Canopy is available to stream in New Zealand now on Prime Video.
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