Last Stop Larrimah · My Hijacking

The crime
It’s not entirely clear Irish ex-pat Patrick “Paddy” Moriarty and his dog, Kellie, didn’t wander into the Australian outback, but Australian authorities assumed that Moriarty had gone missing because he’d gotten killed — and that one of his fellow townspeople in Larrimah had killed him.

The story (with mild spoilers, if you’d like to skip to my last graf)
That assumption should have upped law enforcement’s odds of cracking the case of Moriarty’s disappearance, because said disappearance dropped the town’s human population of Larrimah to ten. “Ten? Like, the ‘don’t have to take your socks off to count ’em’ ten?” You heard me.

And you’ll hear it a lot in Last Stop Larrimah, first-time feature director Thomas Tancred’s investigation into Moriarty’s vanishing, the town he vanished from, and the Rashomate of feuds, takes, and wild allegations about not just Moriarty’s (presumed) demise, but other marginally less lethal shenanigans going back decades. It’s a tough peg to resist hanging a story on, in LSL’s defense; I immediately thought back to a long-ago family vacation that saw the Bunting family truckster driving through Garland, WY. Garland currently boasts a population of 115; back then, it hadn’t gotten out of double digits, and as we passed the “WELCOME TO GARLAND POP. 87” sign, a man was climbing a ladder up it with a bucket of paint hung on the crook of his elbow. You’d better believe we spent the next 100 miles speculating on (read: “whinging at my dad to turn around so we could see”) whether Paint Guy added a 6 to the end, or an 8. Or a 9? Maybe someone had had twins! Did he have to clamber up there every time a Garlandian entered or exited this mortal coil, or just once a month, or what?