On Kangaroo Island. That sounds obvious until you remember how many films named after a place are shot somewhere cheaper and dressed to match. This one was not. Kangaroo Island was filmed on the actual island off the coast of South Australia, with some production in Adelaide, and the decision shows in every frame. The landscape is not a backdrop here. It is the reason the film feels the way it does.
The film was shot across Kangaroo Island itself, in South Australia, with additional work in Adelaide. The island locations that recur through the film include Snelling Beach, Stokes Bay, Emu Bay, Vivonne Bay, Kingscote, and the wild country of Flinders Chase National Park, along with a private beach house on the north coast whose owners asked that its exact spot be kept quiet. The Vivonne Bay General Store, a genuine island landmark, turns up too, the kind of unglamorous real place that tells you a production actually went there rather than building a version of it on a soundstage.
Shooting on location was a deliberate choice rather than a convenient one. Kangaroo Island is a small place reached by ferry or a short flight, and a shoot there is more logistically demanding than a studio. The film took the harder road because the island could not be faked, and the story needed it to be real.
Almost all of them, because these are not sets. Snelling Beach and Stokes Bay are among the island’s most photographed stretches of coast. Emu Bay’s long, calm beach is a short drive from the main town of Kingscote. Flinders Chase National Park, at the island’s western end, holds its most famous natural landmarks. If the film makes you want to stand where it was shot, most of it is waiting for you, open to the public.
A great deal, and it is worth knowing, because the island’s character is doing quiet work under the film. This is one of the great wildlife places in the country. At Seal Bay Conservation Park, visitors can walk among a breeding colony of endangered Australian sea lions in the wild, one of the few places on earth where that is possible.
It is also a place with unusually strict rules about what can cross onto it, and one of them is oddly specific: you cannot bring honey. Kangaroo Island was declared a Ligurian bee sanctuary in 1885, making it the oldest bee sanctuary in the world, and it holds the only pure-bred, disease-free population of Ligurian honey bees left anywhere. To protect them, South Australian biosecurity law bans bringing live bees, honey, or any bee product onto the island. It is the sort of detail that tells you Kangaroo Island is not just scenery. It is a guarded, particular ecosystem.
That ecosystem has been tested. In the Black Summer bushfires of 2019 and 2020, fire burned roughly 211,000 hectares of the island, close to half of it, before recovery efforts brought its national parks and tourism icons back. The island that draws more than 200,000 visitors a year, and supports an estimated $187 million in tourism, is a place that has come back from something. There is a resilience in the ground itself, which is not a bad thing for a story about a family that has survived a loss to be standing on.
Because the island is a character, and the filmmakers treated it as one. The director has described Kangaroo Island as a metaphor for the emotional places a person can get stranded in, and the film uses the real coastline, the isolation, and the beauty-next-to-harshness of the place to mirror what the characters are carrying. The reviews noticed. Audiences and critics alike keep reaching for words like breathtaking and stunning when they describe how the island is shot, and that response is only possible because the island is genuinely there. If you want the story those locations are in service of, told without spoilers, what Kangaroo Island is about is the place to start.
The film was made on the real island because the real island could not be improved on. See it for yourself, on screen first and maybe in person after.
