BadlandsThe Birthday Trip, directed by James Robert Woods, is an arresting new Australian drama that examines the relationships of three couples on a brief luxury retreat in New South Wales’ Southern Highlands. Generally, Australian films love to feature the landscape in a starring role. But The Birthday Trip is different — despite being set in the rural town of Robertson.There are some wide shots of green rolling hills. The couples are staying in relative isolation, with only the glum caretaker-come-concierge and his family living in a ramshackle abode nearby. Even so, the bush isn’t the key player here. The push and pull of relationshipsAt first, the film feels straightforward. It’s about three childhood friends and their partners celebrating a birthday weekend. The partners have never met before, and over a few days the friends get reacquainted and relationships develop. We watch the couples eating and drinking together, doing fun holiday stuff (painting, badminton, stargazing) and then debriefing alone in the privacy of their fancy cottages. But a palpable tension quickly sets in as the film deepens its exploration of the characters and relationships, including the caretaker and his partner.The Birthday Trip foregrounds themes of friendship, specifically in terms of how friendships evolve as the bonds of youth loosen. The film’s point, that people drift apart, is rather obvious – as are its jabs at the couples’ wealth and entitlement.Most interesting, however, is the way it handles the more fundamental theme of relationships, in terms of how people relate. It’s a simple theme too, but the film is from simple in its examination.In one memorable scene, a nighttime drone shot shows the smallness of the couples lying together on the grass. Reminiscent of looking through a microscope, it emphasises that this story is about the dynamics that hold people together.How people relateThe Birthday Trip is curious and confronting in its exploration of how people relate. From the first scene, in which we cut between the couples as they drive the final stretch towards the holiday location, the film is blatant in inviting comparison between the couples. Their first meeting is a swirling maelstrom of close-ups, as the camera jerks between handshakes and hugs.As the story unfolds, we see scene after scene of the couples eating around tables. The camera looks over shoulders, and focuses on faces, aiming to unpack the dynamics between characters, and map the moments they come together and disconnect. It’s powerful how the film plays with their sameness and differences.The use of offscreen sound is effective, simultaneously linking people in one space with what’s happening elsewhere. Props also have the same function. In one scene, the white stripe of a badminton net acts like a transversal, linking and separating players. These techniques encourage the viewer to think curiously about the dynamics of social relationships, and the complex intersection of private and public personas. Various stylistic techniques add to the tone. Hand-held filming throughout creates a sense of anxiety – a feeling that this luxury escape is spiralling out of control. And the soundtrack is sparse, making pauses in dialogue heavy and foreboding. Sometimes the camera will abruptly zoom in on someone’s expression, akin to a visual exclamation point. Comparison can be a dangerous gameOverall, The Birthday Trip is a provocative film. It doesn’t seek to provide hard and fast relationship advice. Instead, it offers a sustained comparison of different peoples’ relationships, with series after series of parallels drawn through the editing, camera work, soundtrack and framing. And it cloaks these comparisons in a palpable tension that is both entertaining and uneasy.However, comparing things (and people) can be a dangerous game. It can lead to a reinforcement of sameness, which is stultifying, as philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze have warned. Encouraging viewers to compare the couples and their relationships could have left us reducing them to variations of each other, which would have halted the depth of the viewers’ experience. Yet Woods avoids this through a sheer abundance of parallels that keep us alive and energised. Occasionally the frenetic camera and jerky zooms are overwhelming, but not enough to prevent you from thoughtfully pondering the underlying questions: what keeps us together, and what stops us from being torn apart?The Birthday Trip is in cinemas from today.Roger Dawkins does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.