Herald rating: *
Running time: 103 mins
Rental: Now
Review: Ewan McDonald
Sam Neill defined New Zealand movies as the
"cinema of unease" and director Scott Reynolds buys his ticket for the second time with this one, following The Ugly.
That was about a serial killer and his shrink; this is also concerned with a
psychopath, a psychiatrist and the underbelly of life.
Bankrolled by art-house heavyweight Miramax, it's set in an unnamed international city that has undergone a lot of changes between filming in 1997 and the America's Cup regatta.
Robert Marling (Martin Donovan — Portrait Of A Lady, The Opposite Of Sex) is a drinking, gambling architect whose wife Jennifer (Joanna Going — Inventing The Abbotts, How To Make An American Quilt) has left him and taken up with her therapist, Dr Melrose (Patrick Malahide).
Marling is doing over Paradise, the seedy strip club belonging to Stanner (Richard Schiff).
Stanner and Marling play card games of life and death, Stanner's game being helped by his offsider, Heaven (Danny Edwards), a transvestite clairvoyant. Heaven switches her predictions to Marling, which rather irks Stanner. He plans violent revenge.
A dark and disconnected movie which was disowned by its backers, released in only one cinema in America and has only just reached our cinemas, there's very little art in Heaven.
