★★★
(MA) 88 minutes

No-one could deny Australian cinema does a good line in psychopaths. Thinking back over the last couple of decades, it's striking how many of the most memorable performances by local male actors are as charismatic killers, in films including The Boys, Wolf Creek, Animal Kingdom, Snowtown and the recent Hounds of Love.

To that list we can add Damien Power's Killing Ground, set in the New South Wales bush and featuring Aaron Pedersen and Aaron Glenane as sinister hunters German and Chook. While less memorable than the villains of any of the films listed above, they're still an effective double-act, Pedersen scowling and growling while Glenane supplies laidback counterpoint.

Making clever use of a low budget, the film cuts between three narrative strands. Alongside the adventures of German and Chook, we follow two sets of characters occupying the same camping ground, a young couple (Ian Meadows and Harriet Dyer) and a family with children. There's a trick to the way these subplots are linked, and while it doesn't take long for the truth to emerge, viewers shouldn't be robbed of the pleasure of discovering it for themselves.

For a first feature, Killing Ground is highly accomplished. There's real art in the way the central location is brought to life as a place that exists in time as well as space, primarily through showing us how long it takes for the characters to walk down certain bushland paths.

The grisly and brutal set pieces are carefully justified with passages of dialogue that hint at broader significance, including slightly clunky discussions of "dream therapy" and the short stories of Barbara Baynton, and an allusion to a colonial massacre that turns the whole tale into one of revenge.

Though the Indigenous background German presumably shares with Pedersen stays largely subtextual, there's little doubt that the killing ground of the title is Australia itself, and that Power is prodding us to think about the relationship between our bloody colonial history and the present day. He's not the first Australian filmmaker to go in this direction and is unlikely to be the last – nor should he be, given how urgently the subject calls for repeated contemplation.

Still, there remains a sense in which the film is defeated by its own ingenuity – inviting us to admire its neatness rather than leaving room for genuine terror to take hold, or for any of the characters to register as more than pawns in a game.