Four buddies head off every year for a camping trip in the isolated New South Wales high country where the focus of their trip is a couple of days fishing.

Led by the quietly brooding Stewart (Byrne), the fishing party also includes naïve young dad Billy "the Kid" (Stone), shambling soak Carl (Howard) and the level-headed Rocco, (Yiakmis).

However, this particular get-away-from-it-all adventure turns sour with the discovery of the body of a partially-clothed Aboriginal girl floating face down in the river.

Stunned by the gruesome find, the guys tether the body to the bank with fishing wire to prevent it drifting downstream…and then bizarrely carry on fishing as if nothing had happened.

Arriving home in the dusty outpost of Jindabyne, their actions are met with incredulity by the police and townsfolk, a moral disgust fuelled by inflammatory headlines in the local paper.

However, the neighbourhood reaction is nothing compared with the reception they get from their wives, particularly the troubled Claire (Linney).

Slowly it is revealed that she suffered an extended bout of post natal depression following the birth of her seven-year-old son and is - unknown to Stewart - pregnant again, a condition that terrifies her.

Plunged into a blind panic, she cannot comprehend the cold-hearted behaviour of Stewart while he argues the victim was already dead and beyond their help.

The incredulous wives simply cannot conceive why their menfolk should have acted in this way…but Claire's drive to atone for their sin leads her into conflict with the whole community.

Cloaking the narrative in a atmosphere of dread, director Ray Lawrence has concocted a finely-wrought drama (based on a Raymond Carver short story) which underlines the politically incorrect cliché that men are from Mars and women are front Venus.

In an opening sequence drenched in malevolence, we see the murderer stalk his victim and dispose of the corpse in the rushing waters of the Snowy River.

The air of evil never lets up and, although the dramatic punch comes from the fissures appearing in the strained relationships, the killer is regularly glimpsed lending a frisson of cold dread to the proceedings.

A little overlong at two hours plus, this is, nevertheless, a thoroughly engrossing story that eschews the standard police procedural to examine the emotional shockwaves that fan out from a random act of brutality.

Tim Evans