Goldstone- RATING: 3.5/5
Written and directed by Ivan Sen Rated M, 109 minutes
Ivan Sen is one of the most interesting younger talents in Australian cinema, but also one of the most erratic.
His 2013 detective story Mystery Road was an ambitious misfire, making awkward use of genre convention as if striving to win over the audience that bypassed Toomelah, a frightening portrait of a NSW Aboriginal community that remains his best feature to date.
This superior sequel to Mystery Road brings back the laconic Aboriginal police detective hero Jay Swan (Aaron Pedersen), this time investigating a disappearance in a remote Queensland mining town. 
Pedersen's performance in the earlier film was stone-faced to a fault, but life hasn't been kind to Swan over the last few years: his hair has lengthened, his once neatly-trimmed beard is ragged and greying at the edges.
Slouching and squinting, rolling one cigarette after another, he has the air of a man who's long ceased active involvement in life.
Appearances deceive: more vividly than before, Swan embodies an archetype out of a Western, the mysterious stranger who sets about cleaning up a society where corruption holds sway.
Indeed, Goldstone the town makes The Dressmaker's Dungatar look like an attractive holiday destination. It's hardly a town at all, just a collection of demountables and shacks, filmed by Sen in wide shots that emphasise their isolation in the landscape.
It's a setting Australians will recognise from the movies if not from direct experience - and like The Dressmaker, the film is so packed with familiar faces it becomes an echo chamber, as if Sen were holding a dialogue with many precursors at once.
Jacki Weaver essentially reprises her crime matriarch role in Animal Kingdom as the town mayor, who wears red lipstick, bakes apple pies and delivers thinly veiled threats with a simper.
The great Indigenous actor David Gulpilil turns up all too briefly as a tribal elder, with Tom E. Lewis from The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith as a more pragmatic representative of the same community.
David Wenham is the hard-nosed mine overseer, with sun-baked skin and wire-rimmed glasses.
It doesn't take long for Swan to sniff out various scandals that eventually seem like facets of the one problem: the trafficking of Asian women, a deal being rushed through to expand the mine, the smuggling of grog into a dry community.
Though the villains are obvious from the start, the film is not about pinning the blame on individuals but about sketching a diagram - realistic in outline if not in its pulpy details - that tells us something about Australian society.
While Sen has grown more comfortable with the mystery-thriller format, the plot logistics aren't managed as efficiently. Swan periodically recedes from view, as Josh (Alex Russell), the straight-arrow local cop, undertakes a mostly separate inquiry of his own.
The ending depends on a crisis of conscience on the part of one of the characters not linked in any direct way to Swan's arrival.
Sen remains a highly rhetorical director, prone to cut to a sudden aerial shot in the middle of a scene or frame a quasi-romantic encounter all in close-ups.
Frankly, he does himself no favours continuing to serve as his own editor (or worse, composing his own lachrymose music).
He has moments of genuine stylistic audacity; the shifts between drastically dissimilar spaces have an almost science-fiction quality, as when Swan sneaks onto the mine site or steps into a van that operates as a one-woman brothel.
Faults and all, Goldstone dramatises some unpalatable themes with power and clarity, and seems likely to be remembered as one of the key Australian films of its era.
Perhaps Swan's next adventure should take the form of a TV miniseries along the lines of Jane Campion's Top of the Lake. This would allow Sen to use an ensemble cast to its full potential and explore his themes in a more detailed way.
In any case, there aren't many Australian filmmakers whose future work I'm keener to see.