Narrative and Mystery Road
Bordwell and Thompson consider a narrative to be a chain of events in a cause and effect relationship occurring in time and space. That is, each event in the story will lead to another until it reaches a conclusion to progress the narrative. Characters act as agents in this cause and effect relationship, without characters interacting or moving around the films universe the story could not progress. Narrative films will always contain a plot and a story, these two differ from one another as the plot is what is explicitly presented to the audience in the film where as the story also included inferred events taking place before or after the film takes place.
Ivan Sven’s “Mystery Road” The film takes place in chronological order, the duration of the plot spans over the course of a week where as the duration of the story is much longer as it includes the backstory of Julie and her murder, the film duration is 118 minutes. The film uses a causal relationship between its events to progress the narrative. This can be observed even in the opening scene of the film. There appears to be a problem with the truck a man is driving which causes him to pull over, because of this he hears what he thinks is a dog barking in the distance, this causes him to investigate the sound which causes him to find the corpse of a young girl, establishing the main plot of the film.