Fuelled by confident direction and awe inspiring performances, Burning Man is an uncompromising exploration of how one man’s grief leads him on a destructive and soul searching path to acceptance.

With a dazzling pre-credit sequence, Burning Man assures us that we are in the hands of a very capable director. It has been 8 years since Jonathan Teplitzky last entertained us with his Gold Coast set crime movie Getting’ Square, and in that time the talented filmmaker has dealt with many personal challenges.

Those experiences were the inspiration for Burning Man. British actor Matthew Goode star as Tom, a chef at a rustic little restaurant in Bondi who grieves the loss of his wife Sarah (Bojana Novakovic) through sex and anger.

However, we don’t realise this until a quarter of the way through. Played out in a scattered, jigsaw structure, Tom at first comes off as a class A prat, a temperamental sook who can’t drive and is unable to raise his son Oscar (Jack Heanly). By the end of the film we just want to give the bloke a hug.

Yet such is the power of Burning Man, with every scene featuring a surprise and judgements often mis-guided. As we adjust to the fast cut rhythm (courtesy of editor Martin Connor) and the pieces start to come together, Burning Man proves itself to be a drama which is crippling in its sadness, cheeky in its humour and confronting in its sex scenes.

This is a film that doesn’t sugar coat its core subject: Death, and its many effects as the dark black cloud of grief spreads over this English man in Sydney and those who love him.

As Tom, Goode delivers his most powerful performance yet, proving his worth as a leading man after dazzling many with his supporting turns in The Lookout and A Single Man.

But it is Bojana Novakovic who will stay on the mind of many. Delivering a performance which is sexy, vulnerable and tremendously heartfelt, Novakavic portrays just what it’s like to live with a terminal disease, depicting the fear, the pain of cancer and the sadness of losing her family in a brilliantly devastating way.

Teplitzky guides all of his actors to perhaps there best work and in doing so has created a film where style and substance combine to make a wholly unique, moving film that has set the bar for Australian films to follow. One of the year’s best.