Brawl
Format: 110 minute Feature
Genre: Rural Thriller / Noir / Psychological Drama
Setting: Small-town Victoria, Australia. Present day
Tone: Gritty, emotionally raw, slow-burn suspense
Logline: Struck down by Meniere’s disease, ex-cop Bridget McKenna returns to her small hometown and becomes entangled in the disappearance of a local Indigenous man-only to uncover a town-wide conspiracy of silence that forces her to confront not just the killers, but her own buried guilt.
Comps: Brawl draws tonal and thematic inspiration from Wind River, Mystic River, and Sweet Country, blending the moral ambiguity and small-town complicity of The Dry with the visual dissonance of Blue Velvet and the psychological strain of Marcella, to create a tense, character-driven crime thriller set against the sunburnt beauty and buried rot of rural Australia.
Synopsis
When a legally blind ex-cop returns to her rural hometown to recover from a violent breakdown, she stumbles into a murder everyone already knows about — but no one will speak of. As she digs into the disappearance of an Indigenous man, she unearths a small-town conspiracy rooted not in secrecy, but in collective complicity.
Set in a town full of men who know how things “should be handled,” Brawl is a taut, slow-burn crime thriller about vision, silence, and inherited violence — led by a flawed woman who sees more clearly now that she can barely see at all.
Concept
Bridget McKenna once wore the badge with pride. A capable city cop with a high clearance rate and a habit of blurring lines, she was undone by a sudden inner-ear disorder — Meniere’s Disease — that left her legally blind and dangerously unsteady. After a high-profile operation ends in blood, betrayal, and the death of her partner, Bridget is forced to step away from the force. She returns home to the dust and vineyards of the Murray region, hoping to disappear into recovery.
But almost as soon as she arrives, an Indigenous elder shows up on her doorstep: her nephew Johnny has gone missing. The cops won’t look. The town won’t talk. Bridget doesn’t want to get involved — until she realises everyone in town knows what happened. They just don’t think it was wrong.
Her investigation leads her to a violent footy coach, a town legend, whose pride was wounded in public the night Johnny vanished. But the deeper Bridget digs, the clearer the message becomes: this wasn’t a random act. It was discipline. Enforcement. A reminder of who holds power — and how they keep it.
With her body betraying her and her past creeping back, Bridget must choose whether to expose a town that has no interest in redemption… or join them in the silence.
Because around here, justice isn’t blind. It’s buried.
Development Stage
Full Treatment
