Director: Mark Leonard Winter
In a small Australian town, a shallow grave and an old friendship send a local cop into the bush looking for answers he isn't sure he wants in "The Rooster" (2024).
What is The Rooster about?
Dan works the kind of job where nothing much happens until suddenly everything does. When the body of a childhood friend turns up buried outside town, Dan starts pulling at the last threads of the man's life, which lead him to a reclusive figure living alone in the surrounding hills. The two men circle each other warily, one carrying grief he can't name and the other carrying a history he'd rather keep buried too. As the investigation edges forward, the film spends as much time on Dan's own frayed nerves and half-buried regrets as it does on the mystery itself, letting the isolation of the landscape mirror the isolation both men have chosen. What starts as a search for a killer becomes something closer to two damaged men recognizing pieces of themselves in each other.
Cast & crew
Phoenix Raei plays Dan with a coiled, watchful energy that never tips into cliché small-town-cop bravado, and Hugo Weaving brings a rough, unpredictable presence to the hermit at the center of the mystery. John Waters and Helen Thomson fill out the town around them with characters who all seem to know more than they say. Writer-director Mark Leonard Winter, working from his own screenplay, favors long silences and wide Australian landscapes over exposition.
Context & significance
The Rooster arrives from Australia's small but distinctive tradition of rural noir, a genre that trades big-city crime tropes for the particular menace of empty roads and isolated properties. At 101 minutes, it's a tightly wound film rather than a sprawling procedural, closer in spirit to a character study wearing a mystery's clothing than to a conventional detective story.
Where & how to watch
The Rooster is available on K-Time with both Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, and the film's page can be browsed without an account. Streaming the full movie requires signing in to K-Time, where the rest of the experience is built around Farsi navigation for viewers who want the platform to feel entirely in their own language.