The Breaker Upperers has already made around $1.7m at the NZ box office, making it one of the 20 biggest Kiwi hits of all-time.

The Breaker Upperers (M, 81 mins) Directed by Madeleine Sami and Jackie Van Beek ★★★★

Your relationship is on the skids, or you've met someone else, or you're just a feckless waste of space who doesn't have a nerve to do your breaking-up in person. Who you gonna call?

The Breaker-Upperers, that's who. A two woman agency who will, for a fee, knock on the door of your about-to-be ex and announce that you have dumped them, or died, or moved to Twizel, or any other damn thing that might keep your now ex from ever contacting you again.



Madeleine Sami and Jackie van Beek are the co-writers, co-directors and co-stars of The Breaker Upperers. And their film is a little ripper.



The first rule of comedy, surely, is "be funny". And The Breaker Upperers, in its best moments, knocks it completely out of the park.

Madeleine Sami and Jackie van Beek wrote, directed and star in The Breaker Upperers.

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Sami and Van Beek are both extraordinarily gifted comedians, and they have been working towards a break like this for a decade. Van Beek was a force of nature back when she was tearing up Wellington's Bats Theatre with Jonathan Brugh in My Brother and I Are Porn Stars (dear god, please let there be a feature film adaptation one day), while Sami has been turning up as both star and surreal-support on our screens for years.

James Rolleston's hot-but-dumb teenage rugby-head Lothario is a genius creation (so good to see Rolleston back in a role that uses his preternatural comic timing). Around this core of three, a selection of familiar-or-not faces from the New Zealand comedy scene – including an obligatory but very funny Jemaine Clement cameo – all turn up as memorable characters.

The Breaker Upperers is shamelessly contrived, will do pretty much anything for a laugh (the funniest scene, maybe, is of the two women pretending to be strippers, to escape being busted for impersonating police officers. It really doesn't convince at all, but you'll be too busy laughing to care) and never lets up the pace from beginning to end.

And if you had any reservations at all about the final few scenes dialing back on the anarchy and gleeful callousness to allow everyone a hug and some "learnings", then the dance sequence that breaks out as the credits roll should be enough to dispel them.

One of the American papers – writing about the film at it SXSW festival premier last month – made the point that The Breaker Upperers seems to exist in Taika Waititi's universe. I get that. Yes, you will be able to imagine Ricky Baker and Hec' somewhere in the treeline just across town. And that's a fine thing.



Waititi – who is an executive producer on The Breaker Upperers – has perfected a cinematic shorthand of very smart characters who struggle to express themselves, of honesty eventually triumphing over deception, and a pearl of real loss and sadness being protected by layers of jokes and distractions.



The Breaker Upperers does share some of that DNA. But it is also a film that stands alone and writes its own rules. I think The Breaker Upperers is the funniest and most likeable film I've seen this year. Go see it.