Acensbart Excellent but underrated film

Voxitype Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

Tobias Burrows It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Zlatica One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Jen Here I happened to turn on my TV and this movie was just beginning on Showcase. I like Sam Neill so I decided to get a cup of coffee and watch a few minutes. I ended up sitting through it all.Sam Neill, as 'The Man' made a very charming, slightly twisted but totally delusional character who escorts a very pretty but slightly drunk Melanie, played by actress Rachael Blake, to 'his place' which is a skiff docked in the harbor. She has too much wine to drink and passes out on his boat. When she wakes, they're out to sea. They arrive at a remote uninhabited island where 'the man' has a shabby but chic cabin on a bluff. He fixes her a hot bath, prepares a delicious dinner for her.It gets weird after this. He tells her he loves her, imagines she's someone else, she tries to escape, ends up stabbing him in the side. I thought that would be the end of the weirdness, but it was just the start. The movie held my interest, made me laugh at some of the things Melanie does with 'the man'. It ends on an upbeat note.It's a love story really. We're led to believe it will be a story about kidnapping and being a hostage trying to escape but it's not at all. It's a very decent movie with a great performance by Rachael Blake. I'm surprised I haven't seen her in any movies before or since this one.

JoeytheBrit MAJOR SPOILERS This low budget flick starts off as a straightforward single female in peril thriller before changing tack midway through and heading down the single female goes a bit bonkers path. There's no warning, or apparent reason, for her sudden mental slide, but that's just one of many issues the film's writer and director fail to address. Why any bloke would want to marry a mad chick who whacked him over the head with a shovel and tied him up in a tool shed which she then takes pot shots at while talking to said bloke's dead/imaginary mate who she has recently murdered and thrown in a freezer is way beyond me. I know he lives alone on an island, but even so he can't be that desperate...Although the woman's descent into madness is unaccountably swift, the film plods along, neither knowing or seeming to care where it is going. The woman is never a sympathetic character, and neither her nor Sam Neill (who is considerably less bonkers, but still a little flaky all the same) are given any real back-story, so the viewer is given no reason to care what happens to them.This one's about as satisfying as a knife in the gut after a one-night stand...

jax713 Yet another film boondoggled by sophomoric "artistic vision." What starts out as a potentially interesting story - a rather hum drum woman who leads a hum drum life meets an unusual, perhaps loony, man on one of her outings to a local singles bar - ends in the most mundane psychotic break ever depicted on screen. This could have been a fairly engrossing dramedy about the desire to be in love, but it went off-topic into a macabre rendition of guilt and mental illness. Though the "need" to be in love becomes the overriding emotion in this story, it is presented in a grotesque, yet surprisingly boring, way. The story physically isolates the characters from the rest of the world by putting them on an island, but the real world is not that far away so it makes the happenings on the island less believable and, in fact, emphasizes the plot holes. The ending is just plain dumb and I wondered if Melanie was really pregnant or if she was having what I believe is called an hysterical pregnancy wherein a woman experiences all the symptoms but isn't really going to have a baby.This is a good movie for insomniacs who won't be kept awake too long. I actually nodded off in the middle and had to rewind, but found I hadn't missed anything important. One star for adequate acting by the principals even though they didn't have much of a script to work with.

Melissa Wozniak I rented this while I was staying in NZ and sat down prepared for a love story that turns into something like Fatal Attraction or something. Not at all. I appreciate the plot twists and enjoyed the extreme weirdness. Not horrible but not fantastic either ( in my opinion.All in all I think the acting was pretty believable, but there are some plot holes (pretty gaping ones actually). However the story is pretty consistent with details from the beginning being carried over through the end. I will look for movies with the lead actress and this director again in the future. Enjoyable for those with twisted minds.