#Garth maxwell jack be nimble movie#

#Garth maxwell jack be nimble movie#

As the disturbed creator of a steam-driven, hypnosis-inducing light-machine, Alexis Arquette proves that his sisters Rosanna and Patricia have no monopoly on the family talent for flakiness, while Sarah Smuts-Kennedy brings a luminous inner strength to the outwardly frail Dora. Jack Be Nimble is a 1993 New Zealand gothic horror movie directed by Garth Maxwell, who later described it as 'a stylised supernatural tale'. Meanwhile, his vengeful sisters are on his trail. A long-dreamed-of reunion in their teens, after Jack's escape and Dora's discovery of hidden psychic powers, cannot match the damaged Jack's idealised memories consumed by desperate, frustrated rage, he lashes out at those closest to him.

By contrast, Dora's parents are kind, if stiflingly respectable, although at school she is ridiculed and bullied. Jack's sadistic 'father' whips him with barbed wire while his hatchet-faced 'mother' and ghoulish 'sisters' look on. After their father's affairs precipitate their mother's flight into insanity, Jack (Arquette) and Dora (Smuts-Kennedy) endure a painful childhood separation with very different adoptive families. A heady witches' brew of fairy-tale grimness, melodramatic excess and dark supernatural horror, Maxwell's first feature induces disequilibrium and unease.