Starting in an anonymous airport and hotel where Martin has been waiting for his orders, the film contrasts his world of modern disconnection with the rugged beauty of the place he's being sent to.
The opening scenes have the chilly thrill of some industrial espionage thriller, like Abel Ferrara's sketchy but moody take on William Gibson's story New Rose Hotel (co-starring a more appropriately cast Dafoe).
His job is to find the last surviving Tasmanian Tiger, a species thought to have died out in the 1930s but which may have been sighted.
The hiring firm is a military biotech company that wants biological samples for its research, setting up an effectively villainous plot that augurs a mighty moral reckoning. Once Martin arrives in Tasmania, however, the story goes awry in two quite dramatic ways.
Given the extreme isolation of the mountainous rainforest that he's driven into, he is stuck taking a room in a house populated by two inquisitive children and one catatonically depressed widow named Lucy (Frances O'Connor).
The chaos of the place is meant to contrast sharply with Martin's ascetic ways. He prefers to sit alone cleaning his rifle or taking a bath while listening to classical music, while the kids and Lucy are more about leaving messes everywhere and blasting Bruce Springsteen.
It's not a subtly handled comparison. In between Martin's expeditions into the primordial wild, he grows more fond of the kids and the grieving widow.
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