Before Jindabyne begins, there is a disclaimer on the screen that warns Australian indigenous people that the film may include the voices of dead people.  Perhaps it was included out of a sensitivity towards their culture, but it also serves as a notice that this is a story that is filled with death and, in a way, with ghosts.  Screenwriter Beatrix Christian says, “Everybody in the story is haunted by something, whether it’s somebody who died, or whether it’s a past they would like to change, or whether it’s the person they thought they might have been but never became.”  The various characters are haunted by actions, past and present, and cannot get on with their lives until they set free the spirits that haunt them.

But this is not a ghost story like we think of ghost stories.  The ghosts are not something that come to torment the living out of some sense of malice.  These ghosts are internal.  They are the ghosts of our own lives that continue to haunt and torment us.

The story involves four men and their wives and girlfriends in a small community in Australia’s Snowy Mountain area.  The men go off on their annual fishing trip to a remote river.  After they have set up camp, they discover the naked body of a murdered indigenous woman.  It’s too late to hike back to report it, so they tie her body to a tree to keep her from going down river.  Then they spend the next day fishing before going back the next morning and telling the police.

From that event all kinds of ghosts start popping out of the woodwork.  Some of the ghosts reflect differences between men and women, or between white and indigenous.  Some have been hiding for years.  Bit by bit, the hidden troubles of each person and each relationship are revealed.  It is the burying of all these issues that prevents any of them from being healed.  When one of the wives pushes to try to reconcile with the family of the dead woman, it is not easy or pleasant, but it is the only way that healing can be found.  So too, the personal ghosts must be acknowledged and released before healing can begin.

We are reminded throughout the film of how often death surrounds us.  I made a list of the things that we see or are told about that are dead: the woman, a guinea pig, a bird, the picture of a girl’s dead mother, fish, dogs hanging in trees, and the original town of Jindabyne which was covered with water when a river was dammed.  So much death.  So many spirits waiting to be released.

But the film really isn’t about things dying in the outside world.  It leads us to consider the death that happens within us.  Death of love.  Death of dreams.  Death of community.  Death of trust.  The specters of these deaths can indeed haunt us.  We may be able to keep them hidden away for a while, but in time they will torment the lives in which they have not been released.  Jindabyne is the scariest kind of ghost story—the kind that deals with the ghosts we all have to face.