Keane

Aroview: A powerful and unnerving feat of ‘mental’ endurance, dir. Kerrigan’s follow-up to the equally unsettling CLEAN, SHAVEN plunges the viewer into the headspace of a disturbed young man (Lewis) trawling Manhattan’s Port Authority bus terminal in search of his abducted 7-year-old daughter.

Modelled ostensibly on the Dardenne brothers’ THE SON, this quite remarkably cribs the same claustrophobia and sense of dread with an even greater intensity. Lewis’ performance makes for extraordinary, if not uncomfortable viewing, most worryingly when he’s in the company of a young girl (Breslin) who resembles his own missing child. Proceedings gather a precarious momentum from there on in – a manipulative tension that’ll toy with your assumptions and worst imagined fears.

NZ International Film Festival 2006

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