David Michod’s The Rover is a brooding and intense journey into a graceless world, with Robert Pattinson delivering a fascinating, career defining performance in the process.

There is something about the post-apocalyptic setting that lends itself to Australian made movies. It has to do with the vast barren landscapes of the outback, and the hopelessness and isolation such imagery can evoke.

It is where writer/director David Michod has set his latest film The Rover. To be accurate the film is set 10 years in the future, where a global economic collapse sees the world succumbed to desperation and lawlessness.

Michod revisits many a Darwinian theme that was also featured in his excellent debut Animal Kingdom, yet cranks it up here with a nihilism that is almost suffocating in its weight.

Emerging from the dust is Eric (Guy Pearce), a nomad hell bent on retrieving his car stolen by a gang of bandits (Scoot McNairy, David Field and Tawanda Manyimo). His only lead on tracking them down is Rey (Robert Pattinson), a member of the gang left for dead, and whose naivety leaves him vulnerable in a world where the weak do not survive.

Filled with a thick, tense atmosphere, The Rover is the work of a director in control of all facets of his vision. Where Animal Kingdom has a script that was as potent as it vision, The Rover relies heavily on mood to drive its narrative that although seems straight forward on the surface, wrestles with many emotions underneath its sun cracked veneer.

The two man show of Pearce and Pattinson is outstanding. Pearce delivers one of his strongest turns in his portrayal of a man wounded, scarred and hardened by an uncompromising land, while also deploying a stare that can burn a hole through a brick wall.

Yet it’s Pattinson who fascinates with his turn as Rey, taking pains to shed that teen heartthrob image with a grubby and dirty look, complete with thick southern accent. Portraying a man of limited mental capacity, Pattinson is almost childlike in a performance sprinkled with jitters, hesitations and ramblings, yet never resulting in caricature, a wholly sympathetic character in an unsympathetic world.

It is indeed proving to be an interesting post-Twilight career for Pattinson, who is wisely choosing projects directed by filmmakers of integrity (two films by David Cronenberg proceeded this, and films by Werner Herzog and Anton Corbijn will come after).

Michod is definitely a filmmaker of such credibility, facing up to the challenge of the sophomore movie with an uncompromising vision that’s confronting in its brutal violence, godless environment and off kilter score by Anthony Partos.

Yet just as strong is the current that thrashes within The Rover, something complex, malevolent, that threatens to consume and hidden from grace. Something all too human that makes it all the more menacing, as any tale of a godless world should.