- 1950's Australia, Ronny is sentenced to life in an asylum for murdering his own mother. Ronny is released early when his father (on his deathbed) admits to the crime. Things aren't exactly what they seem.
- Shackle is the story of schizophrenic Ronny, convicted of murder but released into the care of his unknown grandfather after the real killer confesses. The time is the 1950; the place, Australia. Young Ronny, a schizophrenic, is convicted of murdering his mother, and is sentenced to thirty years in a correctional facility for the criminally insane. When the real murderer, confesses, Ronny is released into the care of his grandfather, whom he has never met.
Australia, in the 1950s, was not the best place to be young and schizophrenic. Ronny lives with his parents in Melbourne. He knows next to nothing about his background, except that his father, Michael, left home after his mother died. Ronny's life in difficult enough, but his own mother's brutal death brings him to fresh calamity. He is charged with her murder, and his condition makes it only too easy to have him convicted.
Ronny is sentenced to thirty years in a mental asylum for the criminally insane. During his incarceration, he is subjected to torturous treatment from the guards and from doctors whose response to mental illness has seemingly changed little since the dark ages. With such poor understanding of his condition by himself or the medical staff who try to treat him, Ronny turns to the other inmates for solace. He develops a twisted form of mate-ship for a fellow prisoner, William, who assaults him. William's death leaves him bereft.
For nineteen years, Ronny survives as best he can, finding friendship with unlikely people in desperate situations. His physical and mental deterioration are inevitable as he becomes institutionalized, accepting the unacceptable because it is all he has.
His life is turned on its head again when his father dies, confessing, in his last days, to having committed the murder. By now it's the 1950s, but conditions in the facility have barely changed. Ronny is a long-term resident, two-thirds of the way through his sentence.
In typically callous fashion, Ronny is abruptly released from the facility. He is given no information, no counseling, no reorientation and no compensation for his lost years. Two guards take him to an outback property and leave him with a man he doesn't know-his paternal grandfather.
Frederick has heard nothing of his son Michael since he left home following his mother's death. Now, decades later, he meets the grandson he didn't know he had. The details of Ronny's horrific experiences are slowly revealed, but what can Frederick do with a damaged man whose life has been stolen by his own father-Frederick's own son? Like it or not, Frederick and Ronny are thrown together to make the best of their situation.
Their struggle to connect and to surmount the anguish of their separate pasts forms the core of the film. Frederick goes on with his life in the only way he knows, involving Ronny in the day-to-day work on his property. Ronny slowly learns another way of belonging which doesn't involve abuse. His condition remains untreated, but he and Frederick make a life for themselves as an unlikely family unit. They have to do it. There is no one and nothing else. Their future is unsure. Their past is too painful to remember. Only the present is theirs... if they can throw off their shackles.
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