I’ve always been curious about The Plumber (1979) ever since seeing that it was categorised as a horror movie, and that it was a lesser known work from Australian director Peter Weir. There are some more genre appropriate posters and videos covers out there that make it look like a menacing slasher, and the opening shots of the Plumber’s leather gloved hands and jeans seem very giallo-like. However, The Plumber is more of an eerie, uncomfortable psychological thriller with moments of awkward comedy, no doubt influenced by the works of Harold Pinter. Filmed as a low-budget exercise for Channel 9 after Weir had already made Picnic At Hanging Rock and The Last Wave, The Plumber sets up a class conscious scenario – an academic couple, who live at the top of an apartment block belonging to the university (the eerie sound of howling wind is heard any time their door is opened) have their bathroom invaded by the building’s plumber. The discomfort is more between Jill (Judy Morris) who works from home and the plumber, Max (Ivar Kants), who is working class but codified as a failure of the hippie movement; he’s got aspirations of being a folk singer, is casually racist and sexist, wears a sticker on the back of his jacket that says “Liberal = Lower Taxes” (in Australia, the Liberal party is the conservative party). Yet, the academic couple are also targeted under the film’s satirical gaze as upper class anthropologists with an interest in African and Pacific Island cultures. A B-plot revolves around the husband Brian (Robert Coleby) assessing whether a disease is the result of cannibalism resurfacing in Papua New Guinea for the World Health Organisation, a theory that is discredited by his colleagues; watching that now, I felt like the plumber was also a colonialist metaphor – he shows up unneeded and invades their space. It’s all very layered including the sexual politics between Jill and Max, whether his friendliness is too close for comfort, and her own pressure to be a domesticated housewife from her husband, and The Plumber’s destruction of their bathroom carries a perverse, threatening agenda – why is he doing this? It’s a pointed, unsettling movie that is under 80 minutes length, a little bit stagey (being in the one apartment location for a good deal of its length), and still retains its TV movie conventions in close-ups before what would have been ad breaks. Available to stream on the Criterion Channel (now as part of the Australian New Wave collection). Recommended.
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