Film Review: Ancestry Road (2025) - Australia
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critic Circle of Australia)
I rated it 7.5/10
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A Gravel Path Through the Heart - Glenn Triggs’s “Ancestry Road" is less a plotted narrative and more a sigh made visible, a gentle ache rendered in the dusty golds and deep greens of Tasmanian disguised as remote Scotland. This quiet, fiercely independent film, born from the director's own grief for his mother, trades intricate supernatural mechanics for something far more potent: the raw, sentimental power of longing for just one more mundane moment with those we've lost. It’s a film that resonates in the hollow spaces, not through spectacle, but through sheer, unvarnished emotional honesty.
The premise is deceptively simple, draped in the practical cloth of Scottish farm life. Kevin (Seb Muirhead), a farmer grapples with the agonizing mystery of his daughter's constant disappearance up a hill on their property. His response is tangible: he builds a road. A practical measure, yes, to tame the land's danger. But in Triggs' tender vision, this gravel path becomes something wondrously inexplicable – a metaphysical conduit. Deceased loved ones don't shimmer or wail; they arrive, bewildered and solid, in vintage sedans, driving right back into Kevin's life for fleeting, beautifully ordinary visits.
Seb Muirhead anchors the film with a performance of profound, understated soul. Alongside, Jessica Stanley as his wife, both manages to hold a story that is not easily believable. Bill Munro, a surprising debutant at 70, is brilliant as the granddad played with wisdom and understated anchor. One by one these, “visitors" feel utterly real, their presence grounded in human frailty rather than ectoplasm.
This is the film's greatest strength: its emotional sincerity, as Triggs sidesteps sci-fi explanations. The supernatural here feels as natural as the landscape, precisely because it’s presented with such mundane clarity. A grandmother fusses over tea, a long-gone uncle chats about the weather – their very normalcy makes the impossible scenario resonate deeply. The cinematography by Benjamin Bryan is a silent partner in this achievement. It drinks in the vast, lonely beauty of the setting sun on empty fields, then finds profound intimacy in the warm, shadowed light of Kevin’s kitchen, making the landscape both a character and a reflection of his internal state.
Yet, "Ancestry Road" is not without its gentle stumbles. Viewers craving a tightly wound plot or a rigorous rulebook for the road's magic will likely find its “dream logic" frustrating. It asks for surrender, not analysis. And while the deliberate pace initially serves the contemplative mood, the second act occasionally meanders, settling into a rhythmic, almost repetitive cycle of arrivals and departures that risks numbing the very emotion it seeks to evoke. The film’s contemplative nature borders on inertia in these stretches.
“Ancestry Road" wears its heart firmly on its sleeve. It’s a film unafraid of sentiment, embracing the messy, yearning truth of grief. It’s the kind of film where you are willing to travel its quiet, gravel path, Triggs offers a deeply rewarding experience. It’s a beautifully shot, profoundly earnest meditation on legacy, the weight of the unsaid, and the desperate, human wish to build a bridge – any bridge – back to those who are gone. It earns its tears honestly, one dusty, sun-dappled, heartbreakingly ordinary ghostly visit at a time. The finale twist gives way to a final emotional touch that’s equally heartbreaking and sudden. A small film, perhaps, but one with a resonance that lingers long after the final car drives off into the twilight. (Neo, 2025)