WE can always rely on our friends from the other side of the world to provide us with something quirky, and New Zealand director-writer Brad McGann is no exception.

Based on a novel by Maurice Gee, this New Zealand-Britain co-production begins on familiar dramatic terrain - a difficult family reunion in a small, sleepy town prompted by a father's death - but moves into darker, more secretive areas.

Paul (Matthew Macfadyen) returns home to New Zealand as a celebrated war photographer with a thoroughly British accent (for which the film too often apologises). He heads straight for his father's den, a warm, private room full of books, records, maps, where as a child they bonded and is now where a local, troubled teenager, Celia (Emily Barclay), finds a dream of a better future in a wider world.

The web the film spins slowly becomes wider and more complex, with the use of flashbacks providing an interesting, but murky and complicated insight into the past. Around the figure of Celia - brilliantly brought to life by Barclay - we discover the thrill of a possible future and the danger of a chaotic, possibly perverse world in which the defining lines between parents and children, young and old, friends and lovers, are becoming blurred.

CS