Perfect Strangers

AroView: Gaylene Preston’s thriller of possessive love, set effectively on the rugged coastline of New Zealand’s West Coast, that changes tack mid-way into blackly comic territory.

Initiating a perfect premise, handsome stranger Sam Neill hooks forty-ish singleton Rachael Blake in a local bar, but “my place or yours” takes her on an unwitting retreat to his isolated bach on a coastal island. The film dispenses with the psycho-tropes early on before turning the tropes of romantic-captivity on their post-feminist head.