CINEMA: Out Of The Blue

Maybe Roland Emmerich should take note of Robert Sarkies’ directorial style; he’s taken a true story and added nothing flashy, startling or sensational, and yet creates a film so visceral it will take your breath away.

In 1990 in the sleepy New Zealand seaside town of Aramoana, a local man armed himself with an automatic weapon and shot 13 people dead. These were not strangers; they were his neighbours, young and old, male and female. He shot them randomly and yet in a methodical fashion, going from house to house across the town. The local police, who had never dealt with such a situation before, found themselves having to seal off access to the area, knowing they were leaving survivors and the wounded to his mercy.

The film is shot in quasi-documentary fashion and we see the hours before the storm broke in all their mundane normality: families going to the beach for a fishing trip; one police officer repairing his roof; a group of friends preparing for a barbecue. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, the shots start to ring out and Aramoana and its citizens will never be the same again.

Without overemphasis or hysterical dramatics the film builds piece by piece to its chilling climax. The ensemble cast (including Karl Urban, Matthew Sunderland and Lois Lawn) give a real sense of this community’s ties and loyalties and how they were torn apart. Certain scenes – a policeman cradling a shot child in his arms, an old lady crawling along a ditch to get help for a man who has been shot – will wrench at your heart.

This is a story of ordinary people with ordinary lives who lived through the most extraordinary crisis and their tale is far more moving and affecting than anything anyone could make up.     Dee Pilgrim