SBS Movie Show

David Stratton ****
Margaret Pomerants ****

PERFECT STRANGERS is one of the best films to come from New Zealand in recent years.

Margaret: Tonight, 'your place or mine?' a tryst with a twist in Perfect Strangers

David: Boofheads are doin' it for themselves in Gettin' Square

M: And the restoration of Melville's ice cold noir, The Red Circle

CAM 2 D & M
D: Goodevening

M: Hi

D: There's also the birth of a nation in Gods And Generals

M: And the frustrated folkies of Finding Joy

D: But first to the tense tango of Perfect Strangers

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D: Melanie, Rachael Blake, lives alone in a small city on New Zealand's South Island; she works in a fish and chip shop and, on Saturday nights, she goes drinking with her friends, hoping to find a man. On this particular night she meets a stranger, Sam Neill, who offers to take her back to his place....

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D: Gaylene Preston's very accomplished film skill-fully plays with genre expectations. It starts out like a thriller in which a vulnerable woman apparently makes the fatal mistake of going off with a man she doesn't know, but a series of twists and turns, plus an unexpectedly mordant sense of humour, keeps the audience guessing. Rachael Blake, so wonderful in LANTANA, gives another superb performance here, intelligent and touching, while Sam Neill successfully combines charm and menace as the stranger who changes Melanie's life. It's virtually a two-hander - though a third character appears late in the day - and the other star of the film is the landscape, the wintry west coast of the South Island which is so evocatively photographed by Alun Bollinger.