There’s a particular kind of quiet that falls over a cinema when a film has genuinely rattled the room, and that’s the quiet I walked out into after the exclusive filmmaker Q&A screening of Pure Scum at Eclipse Cinema in Collingwood.
This wasn’t a red carpet in the traditional sense. It was something better: a packed local crowd, a director who still seemed slightly stunned that his first feature was playing on a big screen at all, and a cast willing to sit in front of an audience and talk honestly about a film that doesn’t let anyone off easy, themselves included.
I got the chance to meet writer-director Gideon Aroni and actress Jess Zuker on the night, while Nikita Chronis joined the post-screening Q&A. What followed was ninety-odd minutes of the kind of tension that makes you realise you’ve been gripping the armrest, followed by a conversation that added even more weight to what we’d just watched.
The Film: A Single Night You Can’t Outrun
Pure Scum is set over one night in Melbourne. Two recently graduated private-school best mates, Ayden and Jesse, are involved in a drug-fuelled car crash on the city’s outskirts. Rather than face what they’ve done, they flee into the CBD, choosing to bury the fallout in alcohol, drugs, and whatever else the night has to offer, all while a police presence closes in around them.
That’s about as far as I’ll go on plot, because the way this thing unfolds is precisely why you need to see it for yourself. Aroni doesn’t rely on jump scares or gore to build dread. Instead, the tension comes from watching two young men make one bad decision after another, each one narrowing their options a little further, until the walls are genuinely closing in. It’s less “will they get caught” and more “what will they become before they do”, and that’s a much scarier question.
What elevates Pure Scum beyond a straightforward chase-through-the-night thriller is its structure. Woven through the escalating chaos are interview-style segments, framed as testimony from people around the boys, that recontextualise what we’re watching almost in real time. It’s a clever device, and one that speaks to something bigger than this particular night: how easily a story gets shaped, softened, or spun depending on who’s telling it and who’s listening.
What It’s Really About
Strip away the neon-lit chaos of the CBD and the drugs and the sirens, and Pure Scum is a study of entitlement, specifically the very particular, very Australian strain of it that grows out of private schools, old money, and the quiet assumption that consequences are for other people. Aroni holds a mirror up to a version of Melbourne masculinity that doesn’t get put on screen often: charismatic, damaged, and dangerous in equal measure.
As for how real it feels, walking out of Eclipse Cinema and back onto the Collingwood strip, the honest answer is: uncomfortably real. This isn’t a heightened, Hollywood version of a bad night out. It’s the version that feels like it could be happening two laneways over from wherever you’re standing, populated by boys you’ve genuinely met, or at least clocked, at some point in this city. That familiarity is what makes it work as a thriller rather than just a cautionary tale.
Will Hutchins as Ayden carries the film’s quieter, more internal collapse. Ayden is written as the “gifted” one, the boy who was supposed to have it all figured out, and Hutchins plays that unravelling with a kind of jittery, wounded energy that makes him easy to worry about even as his choices get harder to defend. It’s a performance built on small, nervy details rather than big swings, and it’s all the more effective for it.
Nikita Chronis as Jesse is the live wire the whole film orbits around. Jesse is older, louder, and far more comfortable in the chaos than Ayden is, and Chronis brings a magnetic, unpredictable charisma to the role that had the whole cinema unsure whether to laugh, recoil, or both. It’s the kind of performance that sits with you long after the credits roll, because you spend the entire film reassessing exactly what you’re looking at.
Jess Zuker as the Interviewer is the film’s structural backbone, appearing in those interspersed testimony segments that reframe the boys’ night from the outside. I’ll say it plainly: I wanted more of her. Every time she was on screen, I was leaning forward, completely hooked on what she was going to ask Ayden about his version of events, and what he would or wouldn’t give up in return. Her scenes carry a different kind of tension to the rest of the film, quieter and more controlled, and they land some of the hardest gut-punches precisely because of that restraint. If anything, I’d have happily traded a few minutes of nightclub chaos for a bit more time in that interview room.
Gideon Aroni: The Debut That Took Guts
Meeting Gideon Aroni in person, you get the sense of someone who genuinely couldn’t have made any other film first. This is his feature debut after cutting his teeth on the “You’re Skitting Me” series, and he’s spoken about wanting Pure Scum to be confrontational by design, putting the audience inside a world of unchecked privilege and forcing them to sit with it as it unravels, rather than offering an easy exit or a tidy moral.
That approach is very much in keeping with the spirit of independent filmmaking that made this project possible in the first place. Pure Scum was produced through Aroni’s own outfit alongside producers Leigh Schilling and Amelia Nemet, on the kind of budget that demands resourcefulness over spectacle. Talking with him, it’s clear he sees that scrappiness as a feature rather than a limitation.
Independent film in this country, especially work this unflinching about class and masculinity, doesn’t get made by chasing a safe, market-tested version of the story. It gets made by people willing to back their own voice and find the crew, the cast, and the locations to make it happen on their own terms.
As for what’s next, Aroni is very much a filmmaker on the way up. With Pure Scum winning over festival audiences and now being picked up for wider release, all eyes are on where he turns his focus next, and on the strength of this debut, it’s hard not to be genuinely excited to see it.
Jess Zuker: The Screen Time I Wanted More Of
Chatting with Jess Zuker on the night, what came through immediately was how much thought she’d put into the Interviewer as a character in her own right, rather than a narrative device bolted onto the main story. Those interview segments could easily have felt like connective tissue between the “real” scenes, but Zuker plays them with a real point of view, someone probing for a version of the truth that Ayden isn’t necessarily willing to hand over.
That’s exactly why I found myself wishing her role had been stretched further across the runtime. There’s a push and pull in those scenes, question and evasion, that felt like it was building toward something bigger every time it appeared, as each time the film cut away from it back to the CBD. It’s a credit to Zuker’s performance that a handful of interview-room scenes left that strong an impression against the backdrop of everything else going on in the film.
Nikita Chronis: Sitting With the Hard Scenes
Nikita Chronis joined the Q&A after the screening, and it was clear that some of what he’d been asked to do in this role had stayed with him well past the shoot. One scene in particular, the bathroom stall sequence, came up as something he’d found genuinely difficult to sit inside as a performer, both to shoot and to watch back. Without spoiling what happens in it, it’s one of those moments where the film stops being darkly funny and becomes something much more uncomfortable, and Chronis’s willingness to go there is a big part of why it hits as hard as it does.
Watching Jesse across the film, there’s a specific point where the charm curdles just slightly, where you start quietly asking yourself whether what you’re watching is a wounded kid spiralling, or someone far more deliberately steering the night, and steering Ayden, toward where it ends up. I won’t say exactly where that moment lands for me, because part of what makes Pure Scum work is sitting with that question yourself rather than being told the answer. But once it crosses your mind, it’s very hard to watch the rest of the film the same way.
Chronis has talked about the long rehearsal period before shooting, and how Aroni encouraged the cast to build an authentic connection through rehearsal and improvisation, giving them real space to shape the relationship between Ayden and Jesse rather than locking it down on the page.
You can feel that lived-in quality in every scene the two of them share, which is likely exactly why moments like the bathroom stall scene land as hard as they do.
Awards, Recognition, and What’s Next
Pure Scum has had a strong run since premiering. It won the Audience Award at Fantastic Film Festival Australia in May 2025, went on to screen as an Official Selection at SXSW Sydney in October 2025, and picked up a North American premiere at Fantastic Fest’s Fantastic Best showcase. On the back of that festival momentum, the film has been acquired by Chroma, with a US theatrical release through Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas from 19 August 2026.
For a Melbourne-made debut to travel that far, festival to festival, and land international distribution, is a genuine achievement, and a strong signal that Australian genre filmmaking has real appetite overseas right now. If this is the calling card, it’s hard not to expect big things from wherever Aroni, Hutchins, Chronis, and Zuker turn up next.
