PERFECT STRANGERS - Reviewer Helen Martin
WIFT Newsletter, June, 2004

Rejecting the gauche advances of her drunken pub mates, bored small town fish and chips waitress Melanie goes home instead with a handsome, taciturn stranger. Here we have the makings of a conventional fairytale. That the stranger’s ‘home’ turns out to be a shack on an island (the wild South Island West Coast) is a little unsettling. Then things take a turn for the even-worse when Melanie realises the guy is crackers – determined to number her among his permanent possessions, determined not to let her go. So far, so thriller.

Remember Gaylene’s first dramatic feature (also a Preston*Laing collaboration and the first New Zealand film made by a female producer/director team), the genre bending Mr Wrong (1985)? In that subversion, where thriller meets feminist practice head-on, a woman pursued by a homicidal creep pretending to be a suitor rescues herself and, by extension, other potential victims, with satisfying panache. The Preston*Laing feature that followed this, Ruby and Rata (1990), also packs much of its punch in delivering the unexpected.

So, when needy Melanie falls for her captor, and when he becomes the victim of her dangerous desire, we’re way out of conventional thriller territory and right back into a Preston*Laing bender that could go anywhere. Gaylene’s first original screenplay, Perfect Strangers is a delicious thriller/horror/love story/comedy, exploring further the psychological terrain canvassed by Alison Maclean in her influential short film/fable Kitchen Sink (1989), while adding depth in its defiant ‘woman alone’ challenge to the ‘man alone’ tradition that has obsessed so many for so long in New Zealand storytelling. Perfect Strangers keeps you dangling till the last frame.

The humour is deliciously black – the body in the fridge episode echoes Theatre of the Absurd in its prime, the scene heralding ‘rescue’ and the denouement are comic highlights – and the frights are real.

An ensemble piece that is essentially a two-hander, Perfect Strangers is brought to life by superb acting from its leads Rachael Blake, Sam Neill and support Joel Tobeck. The other ‘character’, the West Coast landscape (including the Punakaiki rocks, guesting in their first feature), is captured by DP Alun Bollinger in images both striking and bizarre (Melanie, the beach, a full wheelbarrow). And faithful to the project of telling stories of her ‘own land’, Gaylene accompanies her story with a great score of New Zealand music - Crowded House, Don McGlashan, Barry Saunders, Hammond Gamble, Dame Malvina Major and Plan 9, who were also the arrangers.

To date the film’s life includes a special gala screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival and a review from Variety’s David Stratton calling it “one of the best films to come from New Zealand in recent years.”