Coming Home in the Dark (Ashcroft, 2022) is streaming on Prime Video
Director James Ashcroft announced himself as a filmmaker to reckon with when Coming Home in the Dark was released to cinemas in August 2021. Still moving up and down the alert levels, audiences were either unable or unwilling to take a chance on a kiwi thriller with a very sombre mood and the film didn’t find a big audience here.
Adapted by Ashcroft and Eli Kent from a typically bleak Owen Marshall short story, the film is the story of a mild-mannered teacher (Erik Thomson) and his family, taken hostage by a mysterious stranger (mould-breaking Daniel Gillies) and subjected to what emerges is some kind of retribution.
For RNZ’s At the Movies I wrote:
I’m not 100% sure the ending works but I can’t tell you why without revealing what it is, so it’s a bit pointless of me even mentioning it. But the filmmaking leading up to that point is so assured, the atmosphere so consistently tense, the sense of dread so palpable but also so grounded in the New Zealand context, it’s easy to see why Ashcroft has been identified as a talent for the future by some big international players. Everybody involved in this is operating at the highest standard and, while this kind of nightmare story isn’t for everyone, it’s a terrifically successful piece of genre filmmaking.
Coming Home in the Dark is streaming on Amazon’s Prime Video or you can rent it from AroVision.
Coincidentally, Matthias Luafutu (one of the strongest presences in the film) also appears in A Boy Called Piano which has just landed at AroVision. Based on the Conch’s celebrated theatre production, the film is a dramatised documentary version of the life of Matthias’s father Fa’amoana John Luafutu and was acclaimed at the 2022 New Zealand International Film Festival.
