This Australian ensemble drama is a bit like a minor riff on Robert Altman's Short Cuts.
Half-a-dozen people, stricken in some way by a suburban railway accident, are trying to get their lives together again.
Chief among them are a depressive young artist, Meryl (Justine Clarke), who constantly imagines her own death, and Nick (William McInnes), a news photographer who arrives at the accident scene just after he's been told he probably has terminal cancer.
In director Sarah Watts's hands this is not at all depressing. She has a sense of humour and the kind of observational powers that turn her characters into rounded human beings.
She also limbers up her storyline with patches of her own skilful animation and a sometimes fast and furious editing style that only occasionally seems wayward.
What we get from the film is a treatise on life, love and death which isn't the least portentous. It has all the assurance of a first-time director who isn't afraid of making a film that's both an achievement in its own right and a calling card for the future.
I doubt if there are many British directors who would dare to make a movie like this, or bring it off so successfully.
Look Both Ways
Cert: 12A
