After the Waterfall 2010

This close dramatic study of a bereaved father’s devastation and recuperation marks a boldly individual directorial debut for Simone Horrocks and a thorough triumph for actor Antony Starr. He plays John Drean, a forest ranger living close to Piha with his wife, who hasn’t integrated quite so happily into the tiny isolated community, and their bright spark of a four-year-old daughter, Pearl. When Pearl disappears suddenly, possibly irrevocably, everything else that defined John’s life begins to disappear too. Horrocks concentrates her film intently on his existential crisis – and on Starr’s startling self-effacement, inviting us to consider what remains dormant when a person loses everything. As the award-winning shorts she made in the UK already made apparent, she’s a filmmaker in a distinctly European mode, adept at capturing psychological complexity in amazingly exact and intimate flickers of sensation, mood and emotion. — BG

“Simone Horrocks's debut feature is a stunner. Intense, brave and affecting, After the Waterfall is a film that stays in the mind.” — Helen Martin, OnFilm.