Michael Rymer’s stunning directorial debut, Angel Baby, which he also wrote, takes us to some very dark places in charting a whirlwind romance between two damaged and psychologically scarred people. It turned out to be a very impressive calling card for Hollywood too, as it wasn’t long before Rymer was lured from our shores and basked in the success that followed.

Harry (John Lynch) first spots Kate (Jacqueline McKenzie) at a clinic where he’s an outpatient, declaring to his brother Morris (Colin Friels) that she’s the love of his life although he doesn’t know anything about her. After his first group therapy session Harry follows Kate, initiates a conversation and discovers her first eccentricity: an almost religious devotion to watching Wheel of Fortune - she believes the answers are messages sent to her via her guardian angel Astral!

Two slightly unbalanced individuals hooking up seems like a recipe for disaster; both are on pensions and prescribed medications to control the symptoms of their illness and so begins a lustful, all-consuming exploration of one another, a montage of their first frenzied outings given an electrified pulse by the tribal percussion of John Clifford White’s score. The threat of a relapse lurks, one which would cause potentially irreparable damage to this volatile union, but within days, after overcoming the kind of superstitious quirks that seem to rule Kate’s fragile existence, they move in together.

Morris and his wife Louise (Deborra-Lee Furness) are hardly approving of the relationship, but helpless to prevent it. Their despair reaches crisis point after Kate declares herself pregnant, having been informed by her trusted guardian (who she’s granted embodiment in the form of a creepy shrine to Wheel of Fortune letter-turner Adriana Xenides). Seen as a gift from God - an angel baby - the pair, at Harry’s insistence, make a perilous decision: to withhold medication indefinitely for the sake of a healthy child, erasing the possibility of birth defects.

Rymer continually places this couple under the microscope as their lives radically evolve - not as test subjects to be viewed in horror or pitied for their condition, but to accentuate the rawness of their experience and the difficulties inherent in their dangerous choices as they try to live like “normal” people. In two of the film’s most provocative scenes we watch as the first threads begin to unravel for Kate and Harry. Her sudden loss of control and burst of paranoia after being knocked over by a kid in a shopping centre is brilliantly evoked, with the outstanding camerawork of Ellery Ryan honing in on her distress with a keen, reflexive eye.

Not long after, already unsettled by Kate’s lapse, Harry’s past catches up with him as his employer learns of his history of illness and fires him. The thin thread holding his control in place snaps and again, Rymer’s invasive lens bores into Harry’s head as he begins to implode inside a bathroom, unable to stem the crushing hopelessness as it invades his consciousness with a tidal rush. It’s a provocative and disturbing moment, made all the more impressive by the cyclonic force of Lynch’s performance. Like McKenzie, his unwavering intensity as an actor leaves a blur in his wake, imbuing with a uniquely rich and brutal honesty the plight of these precariously balanced lives. McKenzie, as she showed in her debut Romper Stomper, has an extraordinary talent for evoking equal measures of strength and painful vulnerability, often in the same scene.

Even if the distribution of suffering falls heaviest on the more fragile Kate, Harry’s weakened defences aren’t gleamed over as their struggle to bring another life into the world continues, despite the barriers preventing this fated pairing from a seemingly impossible reunion. Thankfully Rymer has the courage of his convictions with the finale remaining a powerful, transcendent one and uncomfortable to watch, only marginally hurt, it must be said, by the now-anachronistic Enya song accompanying it which feels like an irritating, vaguely false note.

Easily one of the most impressive debuts in Australian film history, Angel Baby deserved every accolade it received in making a virtual clean sweep of the A.F.I awards the following year. It’s confronting and brutally honest; an uncompromising love story and insight in the turmoil and peril that people with mental illness live with and are able to overcome. Sadly Rymer, now a hired gun in the lost realms of American TV, has never come close to making such a powerful and personal statement on film again.

Review by David O’Connell

Director: Michael Rymer
Screenplay: Michael Rymer
Cast: John Lynch, Jacqueline McKenzie, Colin Friels, Deborra-Lee Furness, Daniel Daperis
Cinematography: Ellery Ryan
Music: John Clifford White