Stray (M, 104 mins) Directed by Dustin Feneley ★★★★½



At an un-named detention facility somewhere near Wellington, a young man is told that the pre-release work-experience programme he is on has been pulled from under him. The employer is "cutting back".



The young man – we learn his name is Jack – absconds. He takes the ferry across the strait to Te-Wai-Pounamu and then hits the road further south, eventually halting at an isolated crib somewhere near Alexandra in the ridiculously photogenic Central Otago.



Meanwhile, Grace is a young woman newly released from psychiatric care. She is heading into homelessness, at best, when she stumbles across Jack's dwelling.



A momentary conflict is resolved. The pair learn to trust each other a little.



Stray – the title is very deliberately both noun and verb – is an understated fable of loss, alienation, banishment and – maybe – hope.

Stray is the best-photographed New Zealand movie since Out of the Blue and In My Father's Den.

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We know by Grace's European accent (she is played by Arta Dobroshi, of the Dardenne Brothers' Lorna's Silence) that she is a very long way from home. And while Jack is maybe – we glean – living in his own family's disused property, and perhaps has people who know him well very close by, he is also utterly isolated from his present surroundings by the events of his past.



Stray is a quiet and internalised film that will demand your attention and compassion to really appreciate. A resolution – of sorts – when it arrives, is conveyed in a single, wordless shot.

Many films have a quietly tragic backstory bubbling away beneath their "plot". Stray is a rare one, in that the quiet underpinning of the story is brought to the fore, while the noisier, more facile human interactions are allowed to become the odd asides that pepper the narrative.



A short sequence set in a small-town bingo game would sit happily within a Roy Andersson or Aki Kaurismaki film. But Stray never sets out to be self-consciously surreal or odd-for-the-sake-of-it. It's just that small-town New Zealand can be a very idiosyncratic and taciturn place, and Stray captures that perfectly.

Kieran Charnock plays Jack in the new Kiwi drama Stray.

If Stray reminded me of any film, it was David Lynch's The Straight Story, with its same sense of deeply bruised humanity rousing itself for the journey home. The only New Zealand-made comparisons I could draw would be Armagan Ballantyne's The Strength of Water and Daniel Borgman's under-appreciated The Weight of Elephants. But Stray is narratively more successful than either.



Writer-director Dustin Feneley has achieved something very special on debut here. Stray is an indelibly beautiful, human and near-perfect film. Near-perfect in that I believe it achieves almost exactly what Feneley set out to do: to tell a story in glimpses, without exposition, in a way that requires our engagement and investment in the characters.



Stray is film-making as Haiku, telling us just enough to hint at something wondrous and near-universal, but asking us to make our own leaps where the connective tissue might be.

Feneley is hugely aided by a brace of very good central performances. Dobroshi hits every note as Grace, toggling from fearfulness to bravery and belief in a moment, while Kieran Charnock plays Jack as plausibly inarticulate and uncertain, while the anger and loss he lives with every day flits behind his eyes and pushes at the veins of his throat.

The minimalist narrative won't satisfy everybody, and that's fine. But I say on a big screen, with Ari Wegner's astonishing cinematography properly on display – Stray is the best-photographed New Zealand movie since Out of the Blue and In My Father's Den – this is a film to be watched, appreciated and watched again.

You can put Stray up with the very best films ever made in New Zealand, and pencil it into your top-ten of 2018 already.