Is Last Stop Larrimah a true story? Our reviewers’ verdict

Barry Sharpe, publican at the Larrimah pub. Photo / The New York Times

Reviewers Zanna Gillespie and Greg Bruce watch a movie in which truth is stranger than fiction.

SHE SAW

When it ended, Greg called it a “beautiful portrait of a town”. I’m not sure beautiful is a word I would use to describe Last Stop Larrimah, a two-part documentary about a town of 11 people in which one man goes missing, presumed murdered by one of his fellow residents. Bleak, yes, poignant even, but not beautiful.

Larrimah is a speck on the map in Australia’s Northern Territory. There’s next to nothing there now except the Larrimah Hotel, whose name doesn’t do it justice. More than a hotel, it’s a pub, a caravan park, a local store, a post office, a bus depot and a zoo all in one. Towns like Larrimah don’t have long for this world and if the median age of the 10 remaining local residents is anything to go by, this one probably won’t last another decade.

It seems great luck that there was a series of on-camera interviews conducted with residents of Larrimah many years before the murder took place. The footage of the victim Paddy Moriarty is a centrepiece of the documentary. A jolly man who liked to joke around - probably too much - Moriarty comes across as a bit of a pest and a stirrer, someone who liked to create trouble, and trouble got him in the end.

The series is an American production made by the Duplass Brothers’ production company and has an American sensibility that tends to languish a bit in nostalgia. It opens with the song Trouble is a Lonesome Town by American 50s country singer Lee Hazlewood. Larrimah is true-blue outback Australia and it would’ve been nice to mine the Aussie country music catalogue to set the scene.

Last Stop is the directorial debut of Thomas Tancred, whose background is in reality television, and it’s certainly an accomplished first outing that the filmmaker has invested at least six years of his life in making. Shrouded in mystery, the series is as much about the crime as it is about the unique dynamic in this town that has managed to stay somewhat frozen in time - there’s no cellphone coverage here, no smartphones - but is on the precipice of change, possibly ruin.

While Larrimah may not have fallen to modern day woes, there’s nothing idyllic about it. It quickly becomes clear that there’s a darkness to life here. Their interpersonal disputes and willingness to accuse each other of Moriarty’s murder seem funny at first, but in truth are likely the result of a fairly grim, probably violent, environment. It’s not a question of who could’ve done such a thing, more who couldn’t have.

Still, I was moved by this documentary. I’m grateful that, murder aside, this quintessentially Australian town in the middle of the outback has been documented on film. Who knows what will happen to Larrimah, but I’m glad these elderly delinquents have been memorialised in this series. It’s not a beautiful portrait but it’s certainly an affecting one.

HE SAW

It’s an unbelievably great set-up for a documentary: in a “town” of 11 people, many of whom hate each other, one disappears, presumably murdered, and the rest start casting suspicious glances, then outright accusations. It’s effectively Cluedo but with a lot more beer and far more interesting characters.

It’s a no-lose proposition for the filmmakers. The story alone would be enough to drive billions of Netflix user engagement minutes, but what director Thomas Tancred has produced is far more than just a great story. Last Stop Larrimah is a documentary masterpiece, a landmark - not just genuinely jaw-dropping but also a work of art.

The documentary’s hook is the murder mystery, and it employs a genuine and baffling mystery narrative, perfectly paced, with a series of impeccably-timed bombshells, including a killer ending, but what really elevates it is the people, who are so full of fantastic, outrageous soundbites, so ludicrously Aussie in sound, appearance and general air of DGAF that the immediate impulse is to google: “Is this thing for real?”

Documentaries that are stranger than fiction are nothing new of course - we’ve seen a few that are stranger even than this one, and not all of them that long ago. Will there ever be a story as crazy and as full of oddballs as Tiger King?

What makes Last Stop Larrimah so much better than any of its predecessors is its visceral evocation of a world you have never seen before and probably can’t even imagine. It’s an immersion into a place in which no sensible person would ever want to live, or even visit, but it’s a hell of a fun time to experience it from the safety of your couch. By the end of the night you feel like you’ve been at the bar of the Hotel Larrimah since lunchtime, drinking brown bottles of NT Draught with Paddy Moriarty and having occasional fistfights with Barry Sharpe.

Yes it depicts a series of battles between some people who genuinely appear to hate each other, and involves some truly horrific goings-on, but in spite of that, it still manages to make Larrimah look strangely appealing. The lives of the Larrimahns are so distant from the ones most of us are living in our hustle-dominated, wealth-chasing, happiness-seeking culture. These are people who are living for the sake of living. Yes, some of them pine pathetically for the good old days that probably never existed, but they appear blessedly free of the desire for almost anything other than another day on earth and lots and lots of booze. Yes, the murder is a giant downer, but otherwise this tiny speck of a place, full of weirdos and misfits, looks a lot like Nirvana in the never-never.

Last Stop Larrimah is streaming now on Netflix.