Nurse Betty

Herald rating: * * * * *

Cast: Renee Zellweger, Morgan Freeman, Chris Rock, Greg Kinnear

Director: Neil LaBute

Rating: R16

Running time: 112 minutes

Opens: Thursday Village, Berkeley cinemas

Review: Peter Calder

Giddily inventive and dazzlingly original, the new film from the director of the bleak and cynical In The Company of Men is the most meticulously crafted satirical comedy in years.

Watching it is like waiting for a tightrope walker to fall, but the whole thing is discharged with such masterful assurance that you have to restrain yourself from standing up and cheering while it's still running.

Zellweger (who impressed opposite Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire) earned Cannes and Golden Globe honours (astonishingly she hasn't made the Oscars' final five) for her portrayal of a small-town waitress and nursing-school dropout who's obsessed with the daytime soap A Reason to Love and its surgeon hero, Dr David Ravell (Kinnear).

When she witnesses the violent murder of her oafish husband by a couple of hitmen (the tinder-dry Freeman and Rock, a comedian, are a bleakly funny odd couple) she is pitched into a psychological shutdown - a blend of amnesia and trauma that psychiatrists call a fugue - and flees for Hollywood to track down the man of her dreams.

The two hitmen, having not found what they came for, are not far behind.

If Betty ever had a clear idea that Ravell is an actor and not a character, she has no concept of it now.

And as she stalks her prey - and keeps one step ahead of her pursuers - life doesn't so much imitate art as become quite indistinguishable from it.

With a blend of good luck and deviousness that achieves the tension of a thriller, Betty insinuates herself into the soap opera world, where her obsessiveness is mistaken for a method actor's determination, and we wait for the bubble to burst.

There's a pointedly satirical intent in the movie, whose screenplay by two first-timers was also a Cannes winner.

They have in their sights the trash-television culture that constitutes the new millennium's hyper-reality; when Betty finally understands what's happening and comes to her senses, everyone around her says she's acting crazy. But there's none of the unsubtle moralising of Natural Born Killers here or the cool self-regard of To Die For.

The film works within the twisted mixture of fantasy and reality that it is trying to point up - and in the process manages to be the most dizzyingly entertaining comic tour de force since Being There. Don't miss it.