The Jammed

"The Jammed is the Aussie film du jour, a bleak, gritty look into the lives of internationally trafficked sex slaves in Melbourne. After a long list of rejections from funding agencies, the completed film has been praised by critics across the ditch and is expected to be a big contender at the AFI’s, Australia’s home grown equivalent of the Oscars. Two people who won’t be cheering it on if it gets a nomination are the couple who walked out of the screening I attended during a particularly nasty scene. Maybe they were expecting something like “Pretty Woman Down Under,” but they missed out on the rest of a very good social-realist movie."

"Interspersed with sometimes shocking scenes of degradation and the twisted Stockholm-like symbiosis of captives and captors, the film is both an effective lone-wolf thriller and a uniformly impressive female performance piece."

"A slightly bumpy time shift at the beginning is the only distraction to a fine, compelling drama which has something profoundly relevant to say about contemporary Australian society."

"Initially turned down by government-funding bodies and rejected by every film distributor in the country, McLachlan's movie isn't easy to watch, but demands attention and deserves to be seen."