A desperate drifter on a dead-end journey to the edge of the world stumbles upon a massive deposit of precious ore in Gold, a sun-drenched new thriller from actor-turned-director Anthony Hayes, who co-wrote the screenplay with Polly Smyth. Despite being a (mostly) one-man show for most of the running time, Gold is a ruggedly compelling and richly-detailed survival thriller that delivers the goods.
Zac Efron stars as the nameless drifter, who has been beaten down by life but hasn’t lost his kind soul; in the film’s opening scene, he hands a young child what may be his last half a sandwich. He gets off a train in the middle of nowhere, looking for a ride out even further, all based on the promise of work from a crumpled-up advertisement.
The drifter finds his ride in a nameless driver (played by director Hayes), and the pair share an intense multi-day ride that comes to a head when the drifter turns up the air conditioning on the old jalopy and overheats the engine.
But a funny thing happens on the road to nowhere: relieving himself in the desert while the driver repairs the car, Efron’s character spots something shimmering beneath the sand. Informal testing reveals he has found gold; digging around the rock reveals no end to it, and even the old car can’t help unearth it.
Too big to get out of the ground, a plan is hatched to make it rich: one of the men will go to the nearest town and rustle up some heavy machinery for the dig, while the other will stay with the gold. Despite the drifter’s inexperience with the harsh elements, he insists on staying behind to protect his find.
Why don’t both men go into town? The rock is just sitting there, right? “Obviously,” they both agree, someone needs to watch over it. It’s a metaphorical aside from the rest of Gold’s harsh tale of survival, but nicely conveys the film’s central theme: attachment is the root of all suffering, and the greater the attachment the higher the cost.
Gold’s setting is an undefined, possibly post-apocalyptic future; we see road signs in Arabic and Cyrillic along the journey. But Gold’s filming is the unmistakable Australian outback, and it becomes the movie’s most dominant figure: an endless desert, sandstorms, scorpions, scavenging birds and predatory dingoes, cold dark nights and a boiling hot sun during the day.
Efron’s drifter starts the movie covered in tatters and dirt, gets (literally) baked in the sun, and by the end of the movie he’s unrecognizable. Kudos to the makeup team that details his character’s increasingly sun-damaged skin throughout the film, and kudos to Efron for carrying Gold with a quiet, haunting performance that begins with a spark of hope and slowly erodes under the elements.
Gold is at its finest during long, largely silent procedural passages detailing the drifter’s struggle to survive: he collects firewood to stave off the dingoes at night, builds himself a fort out of scrap metal salvaged from a plane wreck, and slowly doles out his remaining supplies. In these scenes, the film recalls the plight of Robert Redford’s sailor in All Is Lost, the high-water mark for this type of thing.
By the end, however, Gold’s procedural nature gives way to something a little more ambiguous as Efrons’ character begins to lose his mind, the final victim of the outback’s elements. An abrupt finale ground the world of the movie back into reality, but feels just a little less than fully satisfying.
Still, Gold is a stark and uncompromising tale of survival and sacrifice, and what we’re willing to give up to hold onto hope for a better future. Gold is bolstered by a stripped-down performance by Efron in one of his most memorable turns, and in addition to crafting a compelling little thriller, writer-director Hayes offers some solid support as the driver.
