Crush

Alison Maclean’s (“Kitchen sink”, “Jesus’ son”) debut feature is a macabre psychological study of obsession, sexual jealousy and female friendships. Marcia Gay Harden stars as the brazen and destructive Lane, a classic femme fatale archetype who finds herself stuck in the sleepy New Zealand town of Rotorua after she and her girlfriend Christina (Donogh Rees) are involved in a near fatal car accident. Lane walks away from the crash site unharmed, leaving her friend for dead and lands on the doorstep of the shy and tomboyish Angela (Caitlin Bossley) and her novelist father Colin (William Zappa). The awkward teen soon develops a crush on the more sexually confident Lane, who in turn makes a play for Angela’s father, leaving the abandoned girl devastated and thirsty for revenge. Maclean uses the shifting power plays as an astute metaphor for New Zealand’s own confused relationship to cultural identity, shrewdly casting an American as the self assured and opportunistic outsider, while setting the film in the mainly Maori community of Rotorua. Cast also includes Peter Smith and Jon Brazier.