Summerfield

Hannam remains best known here for Sunday Too Far Away, an intelligent outback variant on Howard Hawks' poignant Hollywood classics of male camaraderie and competitive professionalism. This follow-up also invokes an honoured movie heritage, but only insofar as it toys inventively with audience expectations of the genre patterns of the mystery-thriller. A new schoolteacher arrives in a small coastal community, to be immediately assailed by portents of unease: off-centre welcomes from adults and children alike, casual news that his predecessor has inexplicably disappeared, a violently accidental introduction to the enigmatic family at isolated Summerfield. 'You've come the wrong way' is the first line in the film, and all the subsequent atmospherics revolve around the teacher's inevitable attempt to make things add up: only to find the equation both more tragically complex and infinitely simpler than suspected. Neither as accomplished nor as affecting as Hannam's debut, but a neatly manipulative entertainment.