11 Aug 2021

Coming Home in the Dark

From At The Movies, 7:30 pm on 11 August 2021

New Zealand actor Daniel Gillies is superbly villainous in Coming Home in the Dark - a deadpan horror about a middle-class Kiwi family on a road trip into the backblocks.

Dan Slevin: New Zealand's burgeoning global reputation for quirky deadpan comedy films is not going to be helped by James Ashcroft's Coming Home in the Dark, a throwback to a darker period in our cinema and literary history, where the remote and rural parts of the country hide sinister forces that can put innocent visiting townies in peril.

It premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival a year and a half ago - a terrific coup to get a slot like that at such a prestigious festival - but Covid and the deteriorating conditions for releasing films internationally meant the producers had to pause the rollout until now. It has been worth the wait.

Based on a short story by Owen Marshall, with a screenplay by James Ashcroft and Eli Kent, and directed by Ashcroft, Coming Home in the Dark follows a middle-class Kiwi family on a road trip into the backblocks. The original story was set in the McKenzie District but the film is less specific.

Bickering during the picnic lunch, the family are interrupted by two strangers: one is pakeha and talkative, the other is Pasifika and taciturn. It turns out the pakeha man has a gun. Is this a robbery - an opportunistic moment to pinch some valuables and steal a car while there are no witnesses around? Or is it something more sinister?

In the opening shot of the film, we see the family drive past an abandoned Mercedes by the side of the road, oblivious to the clue that something may not be quite right in this part of the world. There are cops everywhere in Coming Home in the Dark, but they're never where we need them to be, another sign that this part of New Zealand somehow resists the usual forces of law and order, or is impervious to it.

The pakeha man calls himself Mandrake, as if he's one of those self-created supervillains from The Suicide Squad. He's calm and self-possessed, at ease with the power he has over this family.

He's played by Daniel Gillies in one of two revelatory performances in the film. Gillies is best-known as a handsome television leading man, but his turn here is terrifying and malevolent. The other superb performance is from Erik Thomson as Hoaggie, the father, a high school teacher for whom some chickens may be coming home to roost.

Thomson is also best-known as television leading man, in Australian family-friendly shows like Packed to the Rafters and All Saints. Here he and the filmmakers deftly undermine that everyman persona to reveal some of the secrets below the surface. Full disclosure: Erik's a cousin of mine and it's lovely to see him stretched like this, in something so powerful.

That's not to say that the performances by the other two adults in the film are secondary, even if the characters might be. Miriama McDowell plays Hoaggie's wife Jill and Matthias Luafutu is Mandrake's off-sider Tubs, powerful presences both.

I want to make special mention of cinematographer Matt Henley's widescreen compositions - they're wide and deep at the same time - beautifully framing people in the landscape but also when they're trapped together in close quarters.

We're improbably lucky here in New Zealand with cinematography talent and Henley's credit up to now are mainly in shorts, including several made for Toi Whakaari the New Zealand Drama School - projects where the students from all departments get to work alongside industry professionals to make high quality and in several cases festival quality films. I wish people had more opportunity to see those.

I'm not 100% sure the ending works but I can't tell you why without revealing what it is, so it's a bit pointless of me even mentioning it. But the filmmaking leading up to that point is so assured, the atmosphere so consistently tense, the sense of dread so palpable but also so grounded in the New Zealand context, it's easy to see why Ashcroft has been identified as a talent for the future by some big international players.

Everybody involved in this is operating at the highest standard and, while this kind of nightmare story isn't for everyone, it's a terrifically successful piece of genre filmmaking.

Coming Home in the Dark is rated R16 for Violence, Cruelty, Offensive Language and Content that may disturb and it opens in select cinemas all over New Zealand this weekend.

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