First of all this is one of the most beautiful films I’ve ever seen. Every shot is a masterpiece. They could print stills and hang them in a gallery. Seriously. It’s that good. Cinematographer Dion Beebe seems to have favoured a very shallow focus, something that I have never seen used so prominently in any film, ever. And when I say shallow focus, I mean shallow. There are close ups in which the person’s nose will be in focus but their face isn’t. Sounds bad, I know… but it’s not.
Whilst Jane Campion has a tradition of making films about women in a men’s world, I felt this film failed to be a hard hitting feminist discourse, mainly because the story was so ordinary. There have been a thousand thrillers that have told the same story in the past.
In a nutshell, this is a typical psychological thriller masquerading as something more. Maybe if you approach it without any high and mighty expectations then you might enjoy it more than I did.