Michael Duignan’s shoestring-budget feature debut The Paragon is a slice of paranormal midnight-movie fun that harks back to a DIY era, before big studio aspirations baked much of the indefinable strangeness out of New Zealand cinema.
Screening in the Bright Future section of the Rotterdam International Film Festival, it is a cosmic quest played for droll, self-aware comedy. Duignan channels the same kind of early, throw-it-together gusto that propelled Kiwi director Peter Jackson to make indie Bad Taste (1987), a sci-fi splatter that achieved global cult status, before he embraced the big effects and broader appeal of blockbuster Hollywood entertainment.
The Paragon unspools as a nostalgic nod of enduring fandom to numerous ‘80s fantasy and B-movie classics, such as Krull (1983) with its crystal-gazing seer and teleporting fortress. Also reminiscent of the multi-tasking, in-your-face literalism with which American director John Carpenter went about his early horrors, the film takes joy in its own back-shed, can-do energy, a breath of fresh air in a corporatised industry, as it insists that all you need to make a movie is a cloak, a light-refracting stone and a few madcap collaborators with gumption. Festivals with midnight slots should be charmed by this low-key and unpretentious, synth-tracked oddity, from a South Pacific nation with a tradition of eccentricity in isolation.
Former tennis instructor Dutch (given a nervy and aggravated, anti-hero edge by a very good Benedict Wall) has a near-death experience, when he is resuscitated after a hit-and-run accident on the streets of New Zealand’s biggest city, Auckland. Determined to exact revenge over his residual injuries, he tries to track down the driver of the silver Toyota Corolla that mowed into him. His slim prospects of finding the person responsible turn around when he enlists the help of psychic coach Lyra (Florence Noble), who has been advertising her services on flyers around town to make a little cash. A witchy figure in a black velvet hood with a V-shape inked on her forehead, she does not let her commitment to occult mystery get in the way of ensuring Dutch follows her matter-of-fact programme of exercises in tele-location to the letter.
Dutch, in diffidently skeptical and sardonic Kiwi fashion, is not the most enthusiastic of students. He goes about the colour-coding of his diet and breathwork (tasks that lightly lampoon wellness culture) with a reluctance only banished when Lyra demonstrates the tremendous force of her psionic powers, proving she is no fraud. Disregarding his tutor’s warning about potential insanity from attempted shortcuts, he wolfs down a pill to speed up the process (cue flashes of psychedelia for the audience.)
Lyra has an agenda of her own. She needs an acolyte to assist her in retrieving the Paragon, a hyper-dimensional crystal too powerful to be entrusted into human possession, which has been the cause of much inter-generational wrangling and strife in her sorcerer family. She is determined to hide it in a parallel dimension of space-time where her brother Haxan (Jonny Brugh), who has gone over to the dark side after an epic battle with their father, cannot get his hands on it.
Despite the plot’s out-there ridiculousness, there is an undertow of heartfelt emotion and piercing melancholy that saves the film from complete throwaway hamminess. Dutch’s meeting with the hit-and-run driver, a newly single mother struggling with alcohol issues (Michelle Ang), does not embolden his zest for the violent payback as he expected, but opens a possible new pathway for healing from the breakdown of his own marriage. In the end, it also becomes a film about the untameable randomness of fate, and the beauty of second chances.
Director, screenwriter, cinematographer, editor: Michael Duignan
Cast: Michelle Ang, Benedict Wall, Florence Noble, Jonny Brugh, Jessica Grace Smith, Shadon Meredith
Producers: Michael Duignan, Lissy Turner
Production Design: Gavin Walker
Sound design: Shane Taipari
Music: Lucola
Production company: Our Invisible College (New Zealand)
World sales: Our Invisible College (New Zealand)
Festival: Rotterdam (Bright Future section)
In English
83 minutes
