The movie was so good, building up the suspense and leaving you sitting on the edge of your seat. The problem is...there were too many unexplained occurrences and unintelligible accents that I just couldn't deal with. I feel as though the Raymond's wife was built up as a potential suspect, which I think she could have been given the fact that she knew about her husbands affair but chose to say nothing. I honestly believed for a second that she was the blackmailer. But instead Ray's boss found the blackmailer...who happened to be a man I don't even remember being introduced in the movie? To add that, how did his boss and the only cop in town know about the blackmailing? Why did Ray bury Leonard if him dying on at the construction site was an accident? Why did Carla stand around during the gun fight at the end instead of grabbing her husband's gun? Nothing at the end made sense. And why did the poor dog have to die? Did no one even know or care that it was dead? Such a shame. Every death in this movie happened needlessly. Every person that died was innocent except Carla. If you like movies that build up perfectly but let you down in the end, then man....this is the perfect movie for you.

People rip this movie for not having a "credible plot" -- I think it's a ridiculous complaint, when that is exactly the point of the movie: it gets so tangled up, things go so over-the-top terribly wrong, that it becomes a black comedy. It's an intensively cruel, sadistic play on director/writer's N. Edgerton's part, who had shown his morbid and absurd sense of humor prior with the ingenious short feature "Spider", and it's at the heart of this movie.The lead character of the movie, Raymond Yale descends into noir hell: every step he takes is a misstep, and every misstep leads him into bigger and bigger mess. The Square is intense, absurd, suspenseful, and outrageously fun.

When the dog got killed I laughed, soft-hearted dog lover that I am, because the Dog was standing in for the Square. (And what a dog! Able to race through neighborhoods, swim a river and then run through yet another neighborhood to find his cutie!) Come to think of it, the two owners of the dogs, in the opening sequence, while hooking up, had both dogs in the same car. Maybe the director's cut will open on the two dogs having a go of it and then pan over to Ray and Carla getting it on. But seriously..... By not showing a compelling reason, other than sex, in even one scene, I had increasing difficulty over Ray's willingness to dump everything for the sake of his sex mate. And jumping to the end of the movie, after a badly staged scene of Carla getting killed.....and the camera-on-a-crane showing a disconsolate and bloody Ray walking down the street away from the carnage, one is supposed to say 'tsk-tsk' poor guy. But I didn't have any sympathy for either Carla or Ray at that point. How do you sympathize with characters who have little character and who you don't like?Other more technical annoyances were a couple of impenetrable accents and also poor casting choices which made it confusing to know who was who.Why did Lenny steal the generator? And what did he have on Ray?It also wasn't enough to kill, in a road accident, the suspicious foreman but the writers had to also place an infant in the vehicle.After a break in, wouldn't the obvious thing to happen, with all the materials lying around, be the hiring of a security guard?And pray tell how did the boss-of-bosses and the law know about the blackmailing? More important, how were they going to resolve the serious breach of the law that they were involved in?There really were more silly things gathering along the way but you get the idea.....

Unlike some rapturous reviewers, I don't get the appeal of this movie at all. It is violent, senseless, and then violent some more. Why is everyone in Australia heavily armed, except our hero? The performances are fine, but what good is that if the movie is too long and the plot hard to follow? If you want to see a coherent drama concerning a big bag of hot cash, rent "A Simple Plan" and call it good. (Length requirements constrain me to add that the movie concerns a married man and a married woman who want to run off together. She spots a stash of cash her husband has hidden in the attic, and they scheme to get it by - hiring an arsonist to burn the house down after she steals it! Unfortunately, that doesn't work out too well because the arsonist's girlfriend doesn't get to him in time to call the whole thing off, and the husband isn't fooled anyway. Meanwhile, hero has some cash flow problems of his own by taking a kickback at work. A character who threatens to expose him impales himself accidentally, but our hero feels compelled to bury the body secretly anyway. The two schemes of thievery are vainly interwoven as if they somehow share a parallel theme other than concerning stolen money, but the Edgertons just aren't that skilled at the loom.)