REVIEWED - IN MY FATHER'S DEN: This stark Kiwi-set drama marks an impressive debut for director Brad McGann, writes Michael Dwyer
PAST and present collide forcefully in Bard McGann's highly assured first feature, a brooding, character-driven mystery-drama set in on the south island of New Zealand. It opens in the present, when Paul Prior (Matthew Macfadyen) returns to his rural hometown for the funeral of his widower father. Paul has stayed away since he left home 17 years earlier while still in his teens and went on to carve his niche as a photographer in war zones around the world.
Home is a more intimate battlefield, and Paul resolves to leave again as soon as possible. He and his brother, Andrew (Colin Moy), now an ostrich farmer, hardly recognise each other, and simmering tensions remain since Paul's abrupt departure all those years ago.
Paul stays on, reluctantly at first, to sort out his father's belongings before putting up his property for sale. He welcomes a respite from the trauma of his profession, in which he has been celebrated and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, humiliated when held in captivity, and vilified as a vulture and a parasite.
Rediscovering the den where his father escaped from his puritanical wife into books and wine, Paul is haunted by memories from his youth, and he becomes drawn to Celia (Emily Barclay), the 16-year-old daughter of Paul's first girlfriend (Jodie Rimmer). Intrigued by Celia's deep interest in writing and travel, Paul takes her under his wing in a protector-protege relationship that prompts frowns from his brother and the close-knit local community.
In adapting Maurice Gee's 1972 novel on which the film is based, McGann teasingly reveals dark secrets from the past and present through an intricately devised time-shifting structure, with judiciously employed flashbacks offering leading clues as readily as McGann deliberately wrong-foots the viewer until the emotional jigsaw finally falls into place.
Slow-burning to begin, In My Father's Den gradually exerts a compelling hold on the viewer drawn into its tangled web. McGann establishes and sustains a moody, puzzling atmosphere, effectively contrasting the rural town's suffocating air of prying parochialism with the rugged beauty of its surroundings. These are handsomely captured in the compositions of Stuart Dryburgh, the US-based cinematographer working in his native New Zealand for the first time since Once Were Warriors in 1994.
Crucial to the movie's dramatic intensity is the quality of the performances from a well-chosen cast, notably Barclay, a touching and expressive young discovery, and Macfadyen, the English actor who stars in the BBC series Spooks and plays Mr Darcy in a new movie of Pride and Prejudice, which opens in September.
In My Father's Den is a co-production between New Zealand and Little Bird Films, which has its offices in Dublin and London.
