REVIEWS
Cinema76 - Dan Scully - 7 April 2020
Stray is a mesmerising slow burn
Rating: ★★★★
A compelling duality serves as the through-line for Dustin Feneley’s debut film, Stray. On a surface level, not much really happens in the film. It’s quite light on plot overall. Yet at the same time, in order to appreciate this slow burn drama, the viewer cannot be passive. It’s in the small touches, rather than any large, dramatic flourishes, that we see what Feneley’s aims are with this picture. If you can meet its pace, and agree to bask in the visuals, the tone, and the performances, the fact that little happens should be of minimal concern. Consuming this unique tale on a rainy, quarantined day was an experience in tonal perfection.
Kieran Charnock plays Jack, a young ex-convict who has recently been told that the work release program he participates in is essentially giving him the boot. The nature of his crimes — we are told they were violent, but are not given any details until much later, and even then we don’t get much — will prevent him from having a choice in future employment opportunities. Jack understands, and after placating the commanding officer/bearer of bad news, he absconds to a remote area where his father has abandoned a pretty nice little cabin. Meanwhile, we find Grace (Arta Dobroshi) in a similar situation. She’s fresh out of a psychiatric facility, and is essentially facing homelessness. In her quest for something, anything, she stumbles across Jack’s cabin and breaks in. The two form a bond based in their shared suffering, and as they learn more about one another, and about how to function in a world that is happy to leave them behind due to their mistakes, we learn more about the specifics of each of their circumstances.
The thing is, the two lost souls don’t meet until well-past the halfway point of the film. The bulk of the first reel is mostly without dialogue, following Jack as he goes about his tedious day-to-day existence. Peppered in are a few introductory check-ins on Grace. With the film going in the direction it’s apparently headed at the point, it’s admittedly hard not to feel like Grace is getting a touch sidelined when it comes to screen time, especially since Dobroshi’s performance is so commanding, but this issue rounds itself out in the third act, when the two leads really start to develop into full-fledged characters. And really, being a minimalist narrative, to make any perfunctory exposition would be a liability in hindsight.
What could be too slow of a burn is made mesmerizing by not just the central performances, but the filmmaking. Writer/director Dustin Feneley captures the environment with a crisp digital clarity that maintains hard lines of contrast while also highlighting the asymmetrical nature of, well, nature. Oftentimes, the lens keeps the entire depth of field in sharp focus, minimizing the fog of distance to give the audience an overwhelming feeling of smallness amidst a larger landscape. When the narrative moves indoors, the same elimination of visual perspective is used to create a sense of claustrophobia. Almost magically, this feeling of claustrophobia melts away when Jack and Grace share the frame, despite taking up more visual real estate. As they are given license to relax and enjoy one another’s company, we too are allowed a moment to breathe; a moment to understand how important it is for our protagonists to embrace the small blessings they struggle to find.
Cinematographer Ari Wegner (Lady Macbeth, In Fabric) lights every shot in a way that feels naturalistic, but doesn’t look plain in the way that crisp digital photography often can. The frame is given the feel of an open window through which we see our players rather than a screen, but retains the feeling of cinema. There’s none of that hyperreal blandness that is best associated with the motion smoothing setting that your dad doesn’t know how to deactivate on his TV. This is key to making such a lightly plotted film a compelling one — emotion is impeccably evoked through the language of film.
Resolution, if you could even call it that, is of little interest to the narrative, and really, when in life does proper resolution really occur? For the most part, it doesn’t, but we do get tastes of it as personal growth occurs. Stray honors the piecemeal nature of closure and growth. A rule of screenwriting is that the story being told should be the protagonist’s biggest life event, one from which they emerge a new person. But rules, as they say, are made to be broken. The big, life-changing events that have affected Jack and Grace happened long before the film begins, and any bookmarkable happenings henceforth occur long after the movie ends. Feneley’s script smartly avoids giving us the specifics of these events, but lets us know just enough to understand why our heroes are where they are emotionally, and why their respective environments aren’t as malleable as they might be for others. It also gives the audience’s “delay judgment” muscle a workout (and it’s a muscle that atrophies quite expediently if not used). What we ultimately see depicted are essential moments of character growth, designed to invite our empathy.
Like the characters at its center, Stray is a challenging nut to crack, but a worthwhile one if you’re willing to give it your time, attention, and the empathy required to make interaction with it compelling. Those who are willing to offer these items up will be rewarded. I get the sense that later on in the week, certain elements of this film will manifest in my thoughts in a big way, and it’s the metered ambiguity of the plot that I have to thank for this.
Flick Feast - Frank Ochieng - 1 April 2020
Film Review: Stray
Rating: ★★★★
Writer-director Dustin Feneley’s impressive feature debut Stray is contemplative and resoundingly lyrical in representing two kinds of nature set against one another: pained human nature and the Great Outdoors joined at the emotional hip in the feeling of alienation. Dutifully, Feneley crafts a solidly probing character study of a couple of outsiders’ despair in a chilly landscape of scenic isolation that effectively works on the senses. Stray is soundly poetic and thought-provoking in its well-presented observation about severely disillusioned strangers coming together in unison of loss and love.
Aptly received as an exquisite indie arthouse drama fortified with blessed visuals, Stray marvellously pulls off the intimate elements of personalized strife for its two leading lost protagonists while providing an opulent New Zealand-based winterized mountainous playground for our outcast couple to bond in steady-made angst and adoration. Thoroughly insightful and armed with dysfunctional intrigue, Feneley’s resourceful scope of complicated existences in the backdrop of eye-popping natural scenery is something certainly hard to resist.
This absorbing showcase introduces the problematic pair of Jack and Grace (Kiernan Charnock and Arta Dobroshi) as they both look to ditch their blistering backstories within the cooling confines of the remote Central Otago. For Jack, he is a reserved tortured specimen finally getting released from prison courtesy of his previous attempt to kill his mature neighbor (Gerard Murphy) who killed Jack’s girlfriend in a hit-and-run scenario. Jack still maintains his disturbing undertones of hostility as he now has to consult with his parole officer (Joel Fili). A decision is made by Jack to take a long trek to the distant mountain cabin to chill out and figure out things. The far destination is not flashy by any means but at least it is a place where he can somewhat sort out his embedded anxieties.
Grace has her own distinctive demons to deal with at large. Recently released from the psychiatric ward the homeless Grace has no one or nowhere to particularly turn to for comfort. She is alone and only operating on a small supply of meds. Much like Jack’s way of thinking, Grace figures on wandering off long distance to a place where she can do some much needed healing in the aftermath of her facility duration. Conveniently, Grace settles on hanging out at Jack’s cabin as her chosen resting spot. When Jack discovers Grace at his premises the two strays suddenly have each other regardless of their harboring any psychological scars that still haunt them intrinsically.
The troubled youthful couple in Stray is indicative of the incomplete lonely hearts roaming around in constant uncertainty. As the embittered Jack and Grace, both Charnock and Dobroshi are quietly compelling as the disenfranchised duo thrown away and left to their own destructive devices in a rocky setting that is as cold and dismissive as their outlook. Nevertheless, Feneley is skilful enough to convey the twosome’s crippling loneliness and bring them together through the completeness of breathtaking rough terrain. The wintry wilderness tenderizes this corrosive couple and actually gives them a sense of stability in an otherwise unpredictable world.
Stray is an elegant reminder that we all can get lost in the shuffle at some point in our lives – some more prominent than others. The consensus is that we all are capable of having a sordid past and needing to put some healthy distance apart from the hurt and ruination. The ability to move on and not be defined by one’s traumatic tendencies from yesteryear certainly makes Feneley’s fable of the walking wounded an enlightening take to cherish at heart.
World Movie Reviews - Dennis Schwartz - 2 March 2020
Film Review: Stray
Rating: ★★★★
Stray is the auspicious feature film debut of the Australian-born and New Zealand-based writer-director Dustin Feneley. The self-funded film sat around for eight years until a crowdfunding campaign pulled in $125,000 to raise enough money to get the film completed. It’s a well-crafted and well-acted lyrical tone-poem about strangers, a young man and a young woman, who are both outcasts, psychologically hurting and seemingly lost without help from family or friends, who meet on the so-called ‘cute’ in the remote mountains of Central Otago, in the area of South Island, New Zealand.
The dialogue is sparse, while the visuals of the scenic landscape are magnificently filmed by DP Ari Wegner. It’s the kind of indie arthouse film that lets you love it for itself or loses you because you resist getting into its bleak narrative. It plays out as an insightful observational character driven story if you patiently watch the slow-moving movie develop. In other words, it’s much like normal life is when it’s not scripted. With this in mind, it should make for a curious watch for the right viewer.
Jack (Kieran Charnock) is a soft-spoken and athletically fit twenty-something with a rage he tries to contain within. He’s being released from prison after serving a jail-term for trying to kill the old man neighbor (Gerard Murphy) who killed his girlfriend in a hit and run. When told by his parole officer (Joel Fili) that the work program he expected to be part of upon release has been cut because the employer is no longer interested, an upset Jack gets on a ferry and runs far away from the unnamed detention center located somewhere in the Wellington area to his isolated mountain cabin. In his self-made prison home, with beautiful vistas, he is filled with no inner peace and with no job prospects and has none of his folks around to help. So he tries to keep busy by chopping wood, praying while on his hands and knees, and playing a bingo game at a local dreary hall with only senior citizens. At the same time, the passive-aggressive Grace (Arta Dobroshi, starred in the Dardenne brothers’ Lorna’s Silence) is released with a supply of meds from a psychiatric facility in Alexandra, but finds herself homeless and alone, a long way from home and without a place to stay. She reaches Jack’s cabin after hitching rides and crashes there when caught by him at night.
In the wintry setting, the two vulnerable outsiders face a cold world, an uncertain future and a burdensome loneliness but at least can now do it together if they make a human connection and can heal from their tortured past.
It’s a perceptive drama about the human condition that makes for a compelling watch.
Rialto Channel - Francesca Rudkin - 16 September 2019
Film review: Stray
The New Zealand Herald - Tom Augustine - 27 April 2019
The best Kiwi films since The Piano
It's been 26 years since Jane Campion's The Piano graced the big screen, arguably the finest film ever made in New Zealand and a masterpiece of the New Zealand Gothic genre, the most revered and influential of New Zealand cinema movements. Its shadow looms large, an almost impossibly beautiful film that is complex, poetic and haunting all at once.
And yet - in the wake of this colossal cinematic achievement from one of the very finest Kiwi artists, New Zealand film has continued to pursue greatness - and often achieved it. We thought it was a great time to consult local critics to come up with our picks for the 25 best films made in New Zealand since The Piano.
13. Stray (dir. Dustin Feneley)
A hauntingly sparse modern classic, Stray announced the arrival of a thrilling new voice in Kiwi film-maker Dustin Feneley and provided a fascinatingly austere, powerful portrait of isolation and redemption in the process.
Mancunion - Alfie Clark - 13 March 2019
Manchester Film Festival 2019 Review: Stray
Rating: ★★★★1/2
Stray is an independent film by New Zealand-based director Dustin Feneley, and tells the story of Jack and Grace, two isolated and alienated individuals who find each other in the darkest period of their lives.
This film does not feature much dialogue, and it doesn’t need it. The story is told through the beautiful cinematography, with lingering shots on the characters in large open areas of mountainous terrain, or in uncomfortable and claustrophobic rooms. The world the film presents builds the characters and allows the audience to invest in them even though we learn little about them besides a few details of their tragic backstories.
Jack and Grace are the only named characters and take up most of the screen-time. Both Kieran Charnock as Jack and Arta Dobroshi as Grace give outstanding performances, as we see them trapped in a lonely existence when they are together. In a film as slow-paced as this, the fact that these lead performances were so good ensured that I was hooked from start to finish. The pacing was strong, though I enjoyed the story so much I would’ve been happy for it to have been slightly longer.
I highly recommend Stray. It is a bleak story of two broken people, whilst also offering hope through the emotional change that takes place when they meet each other at exactly the time where they needed each other the most.
Stuff - Graeme Tuckett - 18 December 2018
Tuckett's Top 10: The best from a vintage year of moviemaking
We walked into Stray expecting a man-alone yarn in the classic New Zealand style. What we got was that trope pared down to its essence, stripped of the celebration of male self-pity that was always at the genre's core and reassembled as a quietly punishing excavation of guilt and redemption.
Two astonishing lead performances, a haunting soundtrack and some of the best cinematography New Zealand has ever seen delivered a minimalist tour-de-force.
Radio New Zealand - Geoff Lealand - 14 December 2018
Geoff Lealand’s picks for the best films of the year
Otago Daily Times - Jeremy Quinn - 15 October 2018
Hypnotic debut a tale of two people
Rating: ★★★★
Stray is a film I really liked; a very strong debut from Dustin Feneley, and one no doubt influenced by the minimalist stylings of American directors Kelly Reichardt and Gus Van Sant, yet also somewhat difficult to describe in terms of plot, as there’s a lot of intentional ambiguity built into it.
Jack (Kieran Charnock) has been released from prison, somewhere in the North Island, for an unknown crime.
He shirks his parole responsibilities, travelling to Central Otago, where his father owns a remote shack in which he can set up alone.
He meets Grace (Arta Dobroshi), a homeless woman just released from a psychiatric hospital, after he finds her sneaking onto his property, looking for a place to stay ... and then somehow an unlikely romance ensues.
The visuals are impressive; it’s very slow-paced and deliberately framed.
The sound design is top notch, and there are so many beautiful silences that any abrupt changes in volume are wonderfully disconcerting.
The two lead performances are first class; it’s a film where all the elements work in unison.
It won’t be for everyone, but arthouse devotees will certainly enjoy it.
Stray has a kind of hypnotic effect, which may alter depending on how much you relate to the story and its characters, but there’s a neat streak of very subtle humour to keep you grounded and attentive throughout.
It also manages to transcend its New Zealand setting, feeling like a universal tale that could be transported anywhere, boding well for its international appeal.
Scoop - Howard Davis - 12 October 2018
Stray Echoes Leave No Trace
Writer and director Dustin Feneley's feature debut is a beautifully lyrical and cinematic tone poem that brings an unflinching eye to loneliness and isolation. After eight years stuck in development limbo before a record-breaking crowdfunding campaign pulled in $125,000 and finally enabled its completion, Stray hits the screen like a double lungful of frosty mountain air.
Feneley seems to have an affinity for depicting gelid geographies and social misfits. Born in 1982, he graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts Film School at the University of Melbourne, after which he wrote and directed the short film Snow, which screened as an Official Selection at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. He won the Qantas Spirit of Youth Award for Moving Image the following year and in 2011 received the Filmmaker Grand Prix at the Sapporo International Short Film Festival for his body of work in short films, including Hawker, an atmospheric portrait of a traveling salesman, and the intimate portrayal of a young disabled man's first romantic encounter, Eskimo Kiss. With Stray, Feneley has constructed a haunting narrative about a young ex-con attempting to overcome the psychological legacy of his violent past and his encounter with another estranged outcast, recently released from a psychiatric facility and far from her own homeland. Both characters exist at an extreme remove from the rest of society, partly as a result of their individual circumstances, partly by choice. Shot mainly in a few remote Central Otago locations, it is the first New Zealand feature to be selected for the Moscow International Film Festival.
Thematically, Stray recapitulates many of the concerns recently raised by Debra Granik's Leave No Trace. Both are carefully constructed, pared down examples of naturalistic film-making that display a compassionate empathy for those who have made a conscious decision to turn their backs on conventional lifestyles. Like the two main characters in Stray, Granik focusses her camera on people who lead an elemental existence, pursuing a Thoreau-style existence under leaking tarps, making fire from the earth, gathering water from the sky, and conducting military-style drills for staying undercover. Grizzled army veteran Will is unconcerned with what the future may hold, nor whether his thirteen year-old daughter Tom should move into a tent of her own, let alone interact with other teenagers. The subdued humility of their chosen lifestyle eschews scenery-chewing, emotional fireworks, and adolescent histrionics.
Periodically, they wander into Portland, where PTSD sufferer Will picks up his prescription for opioid painkillers at the VA hospital, which he then sells for cash on the black market in order to buy food and supplies. After being spotted and detained by the authorities, they are subject to a callous psychiatric assessment, forcing them to respond to soulless interrogations regarding whether or not they have “dark thoughts.” Although this is precisely the kind of bureaucratic intrusion that Will has passionately rejected in the past, it becomes clear it is also the first time either of them have really thought about the issues involved. Avoiding introspection has simply been part of their way of life, but when their cover is blown they are reluctantly forced to re-enter the modern world, with divisive results. As the great outdoors gives way to confined, claustrophobic interiors, Will's inclination towards isolation takes on a messianic air and he insists his daughter reject the new friends she has made. Tom, however, has a different agenda in mind.
Just as Granik's film opens and closes with images of spider webs glistening amid the forest sunlight that imply a dual sense of both freedom and entrapment, Feneley employs the natural landscape as an opportunity for reflection and personal self-examination. He shares not only Granik's disconcerting ability to discover a degree of tenderness amid desperate lives lived on the margins of society, but also Werner Herzog's instinctive feel for placing figures in a pristinely beautiful, but somehow impervious environment. The movement of Feneley's film, however, is from institutional confinement to the open expanse of the South Island's immensely picturesque mountains and lakes. This is an essentially Romantic conception of Nature reflecting interior states of consciousness - the stark and frozen environment mirroring the spiritual and emotional isolation of its inhabitants.
Kieran Charnock's Jack is a taciturn young man on parole after serving time for attempting to murder the man who killed his girlfriend in a hit-and-run accident. Laid off from his metalworking job, he retreats to a hut located somewhere near Alexandria. He is conflicted between trying to atone for his past and seeking revenge, and his tortured and lacerated hesitation implies that he remains much closer to the scene of the crime than he might care to admit. Locked up in an emotional prison of his own design, one cold evening he encounters the aptly named Grace breaking into his hut. Like Will in Leave No Trace, Grace is off her meds, deracinated, and in search of safe refuge, nor is she above a bit of petty larceny herself. Their private demons lurk just below the surface as they drift into a perversely doomed relationship that possesses the paradoxical potential to both hurt and heal them. Feneley's measured pacing creating a tense, hypnotic spell, broken only by the momentary mutual attraction between these these two traumatised and enigmatic strangers, struggling to survive in a society that ostracises its most deeply damaged denizens.
The movie's banal dialogue suggests deep levels of fear, repression, and denial with a minimalist linguistic economy that is heavily freighted with negative affect, underscoring Jack and Grace's fundamental inability to articulate their feelings. This heartbreaking sense of separation is expressed not through explanatory exposition, but by means of understated looks, gestures, and body language. Charnock plays Jack the lag with wounded vulnerability, while Arta Dobroshi's equally muted performance as the older woman with a troubled past is as striking as Kiwi Thomasin McKenzie's characterisation in Leave No Trace. Ari Wegner's luminous cinematography captures the rugged Alpine terrain in a series of gorgeously framed and mostly immobile long shots. The absence of cross-cutting, close-ups, and point-of-view shots allows editor Dione Chard to simply select whichever extended, self-contained take resonates the most fully. Feneley's directorial preference is clearly to dwell on the minatory and majestic mountain scenery, which is depicted with chilling and crystalline clarity.
For once, Graeme Tuckett hit the nail on the head when he commented that “a short sequence set in a small-town bingo game would sit happily within a Roy Andersson or Aki Kaurismaki film … 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.” With its ambiguous title that can function as both noun and verb, and abrupt, unresolved ending, this is (in the words of Tom Augustine) "an iceberg of a film - what appears above the surface barely scratches at the behemoth of emotion lurking within." Like Granik before him, Feneley has created an absorbing, low-key drama about social alienation that is by turns tedious, morose, and melancholy - just like real life, in fact. The result is a film wrapped within an aura of authenticity and raw realism that should be seen on the big screen to be fully appreciated.
The Dominion Post - Graeme Tuckett - 3 August 2018
Stray: Kiwi Dustin Feneley's indelibly beautiful, human and near-perfect film
Rating: ★★★★1/2
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.
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.
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.
4:3 Film Journal - Doug Dillaman - 23 July 2018
Film review: Stray
Rating: Recommended
From The Quiet Earth and Sleeping Dogs to In My Father’s Den and Out Of The Blue, the New Zealand “man alone” film is a genre unto itself. Having now reached the point of parody (knowing in Hunt For The Wilderpeople, less knowing in far too many short films), it’s fair to approach any new entrant in this field with a healthy dose of scepticism.
Ten years in the making, Dustin Feneley’s ambitious crowd-funded debut feature Stray distinguishes itself immediately from its brethren with its lack of score, striking static framing, and an austerity rarely found on these shores, more common to post-Haneke European art cinema; the first — and for quite some time, only — dialogue scene is staged in a tableau that recalls Steve McQueen’s Hunger. These stark choices immediately double as a litmus test for the audience, as the slow pace and stillness — initially difficult to read as tension or release — will engage some and bore others. But it sets the rhythm and intent of this powerfully controlled film effectively.
Stray’s opening passage follows Jack (Kieran Charnock), a young hard man at the end of a three-year jail term, attempting to re-integrate into an indifferent society, one where his family members are distant and disinterested and job prospects are poor. His soft-spoken manner is difficult to reconcile with the unspecified violent crime he’s committed, and Charnock wisely and convincingly underplays his role, leaving it unclear what rage remains and just how deeply it might be buried as he heads across the Cook Strait, to a remote cabin and an uncertain future. Throughout this journey, Feneley’s concerns are never about advancing story but about observing moments, situating Jack in a rugged terrain, and letting us observe the rituals and behaviour of a man who is alone and quiet but clearly not at peace.
Perhaps a half-hour in — certainly at the point one might become exasperated with the lack of forward plot development — the story suddenly shifts to a mental health respite facility, where the brittle Grace (Arta Dobroshi, Lorna’s Silence) is ending her stay. As with Jack, she exits an institution and enters an uncertain future without support. Abandoned by family, and traveling on her own, she makes her way through unoccupied rural residences, at one point wandering through a particularly grand house as if it’s an alien museum, making the distance between domesticity and her place in it seeming completely intractable.
It’s a foregone conclusion that these two alienated loners will cross paths. With the stark aesthetic and unsentimental tone, as well as a rifle on the scene, one can be forgiven for expecting that things won’t end well. But Feneley’s no provocateur, and has bigger concerns on his mind than shocking the audience. Through watching Jack and Grace — a name, perhaps, just slightly too on the nose — negotiate a relationship as unique and challenging as they are, Feneley’s dramatic concerns become clear. Can we change? Can we heal? Can we leave behind that which scars us?
While not an apolitical film — an implicit critique of the failures in New Zealand’s social net hangs over the entire proceedings — Feneley never lets social commentary overpower his narrative, constantly returning to the internal struggle, and never romanticising the damage his protagonists suffer from. Through patient observation of intimate moments — and an increasingly mobile camera, paralleling the character’s growth as they begin to interact more and more with locals and face their past — Stray finds its way to an ending so subtle, it may take a moment to even recognise the significance of what’s happened. (Those who have checked out earlier may miss it entirely.)
Most of the accolades for Stray will go to Charnock’s wound-up and wounded performance, to DoP Ari Wegner for photographing interiors as strikingly as the South Island mountains that play the backdrop, and to Feneley himself, for capturing moments of striking realism in such an aestheticized manner. (Jack’s visit to a local bingo game, a scene where nothing much happens, has stuck with me for weeks because of its fulsome local colour and lack of condescension.) But worthy of singling out is the contribution of sound designer Dick Reade, whose attention to detail makes the lengthy dialogue-free passages of the film — don’t call them silences, as they’re anything but — sing. It’s a quiet song, but if you listen closely, it’s captivating.
At Darren’s World of Entertainment - Darren Bevan - 22 July 2018
Film review: Stray
Mixing in elements of Starred Up, the landscapes of New Zealand and edges of last year's great festival hit God's Own Country, Dustin Feneley's strikingly sparse Stray is a ferocious debut.
Focussing in on Kieran Charnock's Jack who finds himself on parole for GBH, it's the story of one man's attempted escape from the confines of his own tortured demons and prison. Trapped in central Otago and taunted by something within, Jack's routine is one of isolation above all else.
But that changes when he returns home one night to find Grace (Arta Dobroshi) in the woods - in one of the film's rare scenes of action. She's seeking refuge and Jack reluctantly agrees to provide shelter...
Stray is a feature in no hurry to get where it's going and it's all the better for it.
It takes at least half of the film before the protagonists meet, and there are very few words spoken, though Charnock offers up some extreme subtleties in how he changes his interactions when there's someone else, someone unknown in his orbit.
But it's in his interactions with others that the true pain starts to emerge, and Charnock channels the unease well. Equally Dobroshi, with her unfamiliarity and unease gives Grace an edge that makes their connection understandable and natural.
Feneley's made the film a lighting dream; from the clear crisp shots of the outside mountains to moments of intimacy within the cabin, the screen has rarely looked more enticing. The South Island's rarely looked better either, a combination of both desolation, isolation, beauty and despondency all wrapped up into one big screen parcel.
Its ending may seem abrupt and potentially up for debate, but Stray's capability for exploring the human connection makes this debut a tenacious one and marks Feneley out as a Kiwi talent to watch.
The New Zealand Herald - Tom Augustine - 19 July 2018
Film review: Stray
Rating: ★★★★★
Verdict: A chilly, uncompromising classic
Less a straightforward narrative than a lyrical tone-poem, Kiwi filmmaker Dustin Feneley's self-funded debut feature is a strong contender for the best film to come out of New Zealand this year.
Off the back of a remarkable genesis - eight years trapped in development before a record-breaking crowdfunding campaign - Stray is a breath of fresh, freezing mountain air.
It's hard not to get excited about a film with such potential to be a bellwether in the way we think about and, significantly, make films in New Zealand. Feneley's direction is uncompromising in its control, subtlety and precision - reflecting a project that, even in the bleakest and most difficult of financial circumstances, refused to compromise. Stray has a desire to really push a cinematic vision beyond what is simply the easiest sell.
The film itself, lamentably doomed to be dismissed by some as slow or ambiguous, is a sparse, rural South Island-set story of an ex-con (played with wounded, masculine vulnerability by Kieran Charnock) attempting to outrun a violent past. Eventually, he bonds with another "stray", a woman (Arta Dobroshi, in an expressive, often silent turn) recently released from an extended stay at a psychiatric hospital. Both are at an extreme remove from the rest of society because of their circumstances and, to a degree, by choice.
Fittingly for a film about such consuming, painful loneliness, it takes place in long, quiet, measured takes, often locked in still, gorgeous frames. The combined effect creates an alien world out of the well-worn landscapes of the Southern Alps.
The result is something new, compelling and haunting. Its intricate design and measured pace draw you into a tense, hypnotic spell broken only by the catharsis of finding the human elements in a world that has abandoned its characters.
It is an iceberg of a film - what appears above the surface barely scratches at the behemoth of emotion lurking within. That the film exists in this state at all is astonishing - that it is this damn good might just be a miracle.
Flicks - Amanda Jane Robinson - 29 June 2018
Stray fortifies hope in the breadth and ambition of New Zealand film
Rating: ★★★★★
With an unmatched synthesis of attentive direction and rigorous aesthetic intent, Stray fortifies hope in the breadth and ambition of New Zealand film. Set during a permeating southern winter, the film follows tortured strangers Jack (Kiernan Charnock) and Grace (Arta Dobroshi) recalibrating their lives in the mountains of remote Central Otago. In this exquisite debut from writer/director Dustin Feneley, the two find themselves in a charged, intricate intimacy.
It’s terrifically bracing to watch a character study that doesn’t patronise its audience. With a textural pacing at times vaguely reminiscent of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, Stray renders the meticulous details of relentless isolation. In one scene, Jack grimaces as he runs water over a wound on his palm, then patches himself up. Is there anything more stupidly lonely than injuring yourself when no one else is around? Later, when Grace first stays the night, Jack makes up a bed for her, tenderly laying a sheet on the mattress; a small yet momentous gesture of effort and care he never afforded himself.
These poetic details are ever enriched by Sophie Durham’s expert production design and the phenomenal eye of cinematographer Ari Wegner. Natural light and soft shadows are expertly diffused to conjure winter’s aching fatigue. Fogged windows, crisp duvets, and worn leather dining chairs build on the film’s naturalistic tactility.
Carefully considering the relationship between masculinity and situation, New Zealand film history echoes throughout Stray. And yet, the perceptive contours shaped throughout the film truly do constitute a breath of fresh air.
The New Zealand Herald - 28 June 2018
TimeOut's Top 10 Picks for the Film Festival
What's it about?
This self-funded Kiwi feature focuses on two lonely, damaged souls trying to escape their past who bond in the barren landscape of the rural South Island.
Why should you see it?
After an exceedingly lengthy process to finally get it to the big screen, which included a record-breaking crowdfunding campaign, Kiwi filmmaker Dustin Feneley's sparse arthouse drama is remarkably shot, quietly powerful and totally uncompromising in its vision.
New Zealand International Film Festival - Tim Wong - 31 May 2018
Capturing New Zealand’s moody and majestic southern landscape with terrific clarity, Stray demands to be seen on the big screen
Two damaged strangers fall into a complex intimate relationship in Dustin Feneley’s beautiful and rigorous debut feature film, shot in Otago against the backdrop of the breathtaking Southern Alps.
One of the most strikingly photographed New Zealand films in recent memory, Stray is the statement-making feature debut of writer/director Dustin Feneley. Set in the wintry south, this bracingly spare character drama frames Aotearoa’s oft-filmed landscapes in a clear and startling new light.
Jack (Kieran Charnock, The Rehearsal), a taciturn young man on parole for grievous bodily harm, holes up in a cabin somewhere in Central Otago. It’s not clear whether he’s trying to forget the past or reconcile with it, although his hesitancy with locals suggests he’s much closer to the scene of the crime than he’d care to admit. Locked away in a prison of his own making, Jack one evening encounters Grace, very far from home and seeking refuge. Played by the captivating Arta Dobroshi, star of the Dardenne brothers’ Lorna’s Silence, Grace’s own private struggles linger beneath her attraction to Jack. These lonely, enigmatic strangers drift into a relationship that promises to either heal or hurt.
There’s a deliberate – in the context of the short history of our national cinema even daring – aesthetic discipline to this film, whose suppressed emotions lend greater power to its visuals. Ari Wegner, the talented DP behind Lady Macbeth’s intense painterly compositions, does astonishing things with darkness and diffused natural light. Within these stunning images, the Man Alone tradition is alive and well, but it’s also crisply refocused through Feneley’s commitment to stark silences and bold cinematic spaces into a kind of hard-edged New Zealand poetry.