For Good

Writer/director Stuart McKenzie’s début feature For Good is a volatile, claustrophobic psychological thriller that mines New Zealand tabloid mythology to provocative effect

For Good, New Zealand, 2003

Director/screenplay: Stuart McKenzie
Production co: MAP Film Production
Producer: Neil Pardington
Photography: Duncan Cole
Editors: Paul Sutorius, Richard Hobbs
Production designer: Andrew Thomas
Costume designer: Amanda Neale
Sound design: Tim Prebble
Sound mix: Mike Hedges
Music: Shayne Carter

With: Michelle Langstone (Lisa Pearce), Tim Balme (Grant Wilson), Miranda Harcourt (Fleur Hill), Tim Gordon (Donald Hill), Adam Gardiner (Tom Grainger), Hera Dunleavy (Mel), Peter Hambleton (Colin Pearce), Megan Edwards (Philippa Pearce), Anneke-Lee Gough (Tracey Hill), Charlie Bleakley (Abbot), Zoe Saker-Norrish (Young Lisa), Phil Grieve (Ken Stringer)

35mm, 96 Minutes, R–16

“Writer/director Stuart McKenzie’s début feature For Good is a volatile, claustrophobic psychological thriller that mines New Zealand tabloid mythology to provocative effect. A decade previously 13-year-old Tracey Hill was abducted, raped and murdered in a small country town. Now the murderer, Grant Wilson (a disturbingly recognisable Tim Balme), is up for parole and the case is in the news again. The victim’s father has vowed to take the law into his own hands of the killer is released. Lisa, the film’s protagonist (newcomer Michelle Langstone), was born on the same day as Tracey and knew her slightly. At the age of 23 she can see that Tracey’s hideous death had a major impact on her own development. She wants to understand what happened. Posing as a journalist she visits Wilson and then talks to Tracey’s parents. She is stirred and drawn into the tormented worlds of both. But neither they nor the world at large will allow her the luxury of ambivalence… For Good dares to promote the very ambivalence that Lisa is denied. Employing a tightly and suggestively patterned structure, where Lisa’s identification with Tracey is only the most explicit of several equivalences and parallels, McKenzie refuses to demonise the killer or sanctify the victim. The grieving father and the killer, apparently so diametrically opposed, share certain human needs and compulsions that need to be tended to very carefully. McKenzie’s script draws on material he and Miranda Harcourt developed in Harcourt’s solo theatre piece, Portraits, which itself drew on their own interviews with rapists, murderers and victims’ families. They are deeply familiar with their material and the film throws out enough ideas about the ways society generates, contains and exhibits its monsters to keep audiences arguing for hours.” — Bill Gosden, NZ Film Festival 2003

“I read an article in the Sunday Star-Times last year after I had finished editing the film. It was written by a journalist who was a 14-year-old Napier schoolgirl when Kirsa Jensen, also 14, was murdered there. She says, ‘Anyone who was a teenager when Kirsa was murdered remembers the shackles that tightened around her.’ It was a public loss of innocence. The subject matter of For Good is no more extreme than your average crime thriller, but it is different in that I have tried to remain sensitive to the quality of real lives and real voices… I want people to be left with a sense of loss painfully acknowledged and, in this way, reveal strength, not hopelessness. — Stuart McKenzie, NZ Film Festival 2003

"It is a scenario every parent dreads, and which some families know only too well: a teenage daughter never returning from a horse ride. Wellington writer and director Stuart McKenzie was well aware he was playing with dynamite when he began work on For Good, his new film dealing with the imminent parole hearing of a convicted murderer. But he and his wife, Miranda Harcourt – who plays the murdered girl's mother – had more background knowledge than most. Harcourt has written and starred in Verbatim and Portraits, theatre shows constructed from interviews with murderers and the families they had victimised. She collaborated with McKenzie on the film, and the fictional For Good has an unmistakable ring of authenticity. ‘We were very conscious of the resonance with other crimes from around the country,’ McKenzie says. ‘There are crimes that are similar in detail but they are not this crime. This is a fictional story but we wanted it to have the impact of reality.’ McKenzie says he has spoken to a number of families who will find For Good horrifyingly lifelike. Confidentiality agreements with everyone he and Harcourt spoke to prevent him from adding much more. … Tracey Hill was 13 when she was abducted while horse riding, then raped and killed by Wilson. Lisa is a young would-be journalist who rode in showjumping competitions against Tracey. Now 23 and still haunted by Tracey's death, she finds herself drawn to Wilson and finding out his side of the story. As she stumbles through the wreckage Wilson has left in his wake, Lisa finds herself in Tracey's rural hometown of Reid, in the girl’s parents’ living room, with a potentially explosive letter in her hand. There are some emotionally powerful stories in For Good, and it is Lisa who brings them together. ‘It seemed important to me that she has some of the quality of Tracey, so both her parents and the killer can see something of Tracey in her,’ McKenzie says. ‘She's kind of who Tracey might have been if she hadn't been killed.’ McKenzie feels strongly that the victims of high-profile crimes become divorced from their own lives. Throughout the film Lisa's and Tracey's personalities blur, with one seemingly becoming the other – a deliberate device to give the unspeaking central figure of the drama of For Good her voice. The words spoken by Tracey's killer also had to be carefully weighted. Balme makes him at times alluring and at times appalling. ‘Tim had the right degree of charisma but also that volatility, the swaggering charm,’ McKenzie says. ‘We didn't want to simply demonise that character, so we had to go along with him far enough to try to understand something of his background. At times he's believable and sincere, and other times he's creepy and pathological.’ For Good seldom pulls its punches, either in its dialogue – some of Wilson's speeches are painfully direct – or in its on-screen action. But for the crucial scene of Tracey's rape and murder, the images are blurred. ‘I didn't want to rub people's noses in it,’ McKenzie says. ‘We know what violence is and I don't believe we need to see it re-enacted... but we did want to show the reality of a hellish situation.’ For Good leads its characters to the point where they all meet. Its emotionally charged finale leaves the audience just long enough to make up their own minds how they would act before the characters resolve the story. The events in For Good change the lives of all the characters forever. Making the movie also changed its director. ‘I found my feelings about the characters changing,’ says McKenzie. ‘While it was always important to me to show the complexity and humanity, the reality, of the Grant Wilson character, my allegiance was growing towards the parents of the girl. Thinking people are always pushing themselves to do the right thing by criminals, to strive for justice in every situation, and there does come a time when that striving for justice for people who have done something terrible often seems to outweigh the need for justice of people who have suffered something terrible. I became increasingly conscious of that dilemma as I made the film’.” — NZ Herald, 23 July 2003

Screenings: For Good screened on 12 October 2005 as part of director/writer Michael Bennett's season. Michael "selected a bunch of film pairings that feature some of our best actors both in front of and behind the camera. I hope this selection does a couple of things – firstly, maybe it restores to these guys just a wee bit of the acknowledgement that the scourge of the possessory credit thieves away. And second, I hope it shows that damn fine actors make for damn fine filmmakers." For Good stars Miranda Harcourt who's short film Needles and Glass also screened.