Anna Kokkinos likes to push boundaries. Her breakthrough Head On achieved exactly that with a scorching exploration of queer sexual politic. Unwilling to take prisoners, the revelatory and somewhat revolutionary film rewrote Australian sexuality, at least in the movies. That was eight years ago and a lifetime in cinema. Her follow up is an adaptation of Rupert Thomson’s The Book of Revelation, another study of sexuality from a divergent angle. It is set in the domain of dance, a hotbed of erotic and, by extension, religious expression. It is also an examination of gender identity and power.

Kokkinos has returned banging on the doors of Catholic faith. Every moment of her film is burdened with meaning. Daniel (Long) is a star dancer who goes missing for ten days and returns a broken man. He has been ritually kidnapped and violently, if artistically, raped by three women. Why, and will he survive the ordeal? Answers are found in a film that seeks to polarise audiences and critics alike.

Stylised design and camera work supports some appealing ideas such as the psychology of rape, here reversed, but they’re quickly sidelined. Kokkinos is on a different mission and fills this story with aching symbolism and metaphors: Daniel as a Christ figure being mauled by cloaked women for instance. The Book of Revelation is a dour morass of guilt, repression, longing and shame wrapped in self conscious need. Heavy doesn’t begin to explain it. Stage-bound delivery is ineffective, Long is uncharismatic, Scacchi is leaden and clichéd while Friels, surprisingly, brings the story’s only light. It is easy to write this off as a self-absorbed exercise in Christian-Judeo sexual shock-art: the kind Madonna still bores her fans with. But that, with few boundaries pushed, is largely what it is.

// COLIN FRASER