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Craig Alexander, Hannah McKenzie, Justin Hosking, Shelly Higgs, suff, Sydney Underground Film Festival
Dark comedy has always thrived on uncomfortable juxtapositions, and Snatchers, the Canberra-made debut from directors Craig Alexander and Shelly Higgs, gleefully leans into the clash between the morbid and the mundane. A contemporary riff on Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Body Snatcher, refracted through the lens of Australian gallows humour, it delivers a brisk, twisty tale of desperation, friendship, and the fine line between survival and exploitation.
The set-up is deceptively simple. In a near-dystopian Australia, lifelong friends Mac (Alexander) and Fettes (Justin Hosking) eke out a living as undervalued, underpaid orderlies. When a Jane Doe rolls into their orbit, seemingly a fresh candidate for organ harvesting, the duo sees an opportunity to cash in on their grim surroundings. But when the corpse proves not to be as dead as expected, their plan mutates into a moral and logistical quagmire — a farcical spiral of bad decisions, shifting allegiances, and grim comedy.
What distinguishes Snatchers is not just its premise, but its tonal balancing act. The film operates as a modern Australian take on the Burke and Hare mythos, where grave-robbing becomes a working-class hustle. Yet, instead of solemn Gothic horror, Alexander and Higgs infuse the narrative with a distinctly local irreverence. The humour is dry, the banter unpolished, and the absurdity of the situation constantly undercut by the casual bluntness of its characters. Where a British version might lean into macabre wit, Snatchers feels bracingly Antipodean — equal parts cheeky, grim, and self-deprecating.
Hannah McKenzie, as the not-so-dead Jane Doe, injects a lively volatility into the proceedings, a reminder that the “corpse” has agency of her own and won’t be easily reduced to commodity. The film finds much of its energy in this disruption, forcing Mac and Fettes to navigate not only their friendship but the moral sinkholes of their scheme. The twists come quickly, some predictable, others slyly surprising, but always tethered to the film’s central question: how far will ordinary people bend ethics when the system leaves them with so little to lose?
Though undeniably modest in scale and budget, Snatchers makes a virtue of its scrappy production. Its humour doesn’t always land cleanly, and its narrative leans into familiar beats, but the sheer audacity of its premise — and the willingness to entwine Stevenson’s gothic lineage with Australian socio-economic bite — keeps it engaging. As a festival entry, it embodies the SUFF spirit: resourceful, transgressive, and proudly unpolished, a film that finds life in the margins where mainstream cinema rarely dares to tread.
The Prognosis:
At 80 minutes, Snatchers doesn’t overstay its welcome. Instead, it lingers in the uneasy laughter it provokes — laughter that’s always one step away from horror, one step away from despair.
- Saul Muerte
Surgeons of Horror 