Jack Be Nimble

If John Irving and Stephen King had collaborated to give us Garp and Carrie as twins separated at birth, they might well have come up with this strange New Zealand offering

Jack Be Nimble, New Zealand, 1993

Essential Productions
Director: Garth Maxwell
Producers: Johnathan Dowling, Kelly Rogers
Executive Producers: Murray Newey & John Barnett
Associate Producer: Judith Tyre
Written by Garth Maxwell, with additional material by: Rex Pilgrim
Director of Photography: Donald Duncan
Camera: Mark Olsen
Designer: Grant Major
Editor: John Gilbert
Music: Chris Neal

With: Alexis Arquette (Jack), Sarah Smuts-Kennedy (Dora), Bruno Lawrence (Teddy), Tony Barrie (Clarrie), Elizabeth Hawthorne (Bernice), Brenda Simmons (Mrs Birch), Gilbert Goldie (Mr Birch), Hannah Jessop (Little Dora), Sam Smith (Little Jack)

35mm, 93 minutes, M–Contains violence, offensive language and sex scenes

Jack and Dora, abandoned by their parents as babies, are desperate to find each other after years of adoption. Jack’s young life has been spent with a sadistic farming family. Dora discovers extra-sensory powers which tell her he’s in danger and drive her to search for him. She finds him, but not until he has fled from the farm, where he has committed two horrifying deeds. The two start a quest to discover their real family, but instead become enmeshed in a web of revenge and the supernatural.

“If John Irving and Stephen King had collaborated to give us Garp and Carrie as twins separated at birth, they might well have come up with this strange New Zealand offering in which two children, Jack and Dora, lose their parents in odd circumstances and are split up. Dora is adopted by a nice middle-class couple, but still grows into a lonely adolescent pining for her lost brother. After a school bullying incident, she develops ESP and, as an adult, subsequently forms a relationship with another psychic. Jack, meanwhile, is taken to a farm and brutalised by monstrous foster parents and four savage step-sisters, growing into a maladjusted young man who invents a hypnosis machine which enables him to take bloody revenge. The siblings get back together as young adults and search for their parents, but the marks of childhood brutality continue to warp their actions. To complicate matters, Jack's step-sisters set out to exact their own kind of justice. Too many recent horror novels and films have taken child abuse as a theme, usually descending into areas of distasteful exploitation, but few have been as offbeat as this deeply weird melodrama. With bizarre major plot points simply left unexplained, it certainly has a nightmarish, disjointed feel, but writer-director Maxwell, aided by excellent lead performances, also manages to make this at once affecting, funny and horrifying. Deeply warped, Jack and Dora are still sympathetic and credible, trapped in a childhood that has segued from fairytale to nightmare. Verdict: Not a film likely to please everyone, but strong stuff nonetheless.” — Kim Newman, http://www.empireonline.com

“A heady witches' brew of fairy-tale grimness, melodramatic excess and dark supernatural horror, Maxwell's first feature induces disequilibrium and unease. After their father's affairs precipitate their mother's flight into insanity, Jack and Dora endure a painful childhood separation with very different adoptive families. Jack's sadistic 'father' whips him with barbed wire while his hatchet-faced 'mother' and ghoulish 'sisters' look on. By contrast, Dora's parents are kind, if stiflingly respectable, although at school she is ridiculed and bullied. A long-dreamed-of reunion in their teens, after Jack's escape and Dora's discovery of hidden psychic powers, cannot match the damaged Jack's idealised memories; consumed by desperate, frustrated rage, he lashes out at those closest to him. Meanwhile, his vengeful sisters are on his trail. As the disturbed creator of a steam-driven, hypnosis-inducing light-machine, Alexis Arquette proves that his sisters Rosanna and Patricia have no monopoly on the family talent for flakiness, while Sarah Smuts-Kennedy brings a luminous inner strength to the outwardly frail Dora.” — http://www.timeout.com

“The Gothic horror film Jack Be Nimble has a hallucinatory power and psychological refinement that you won't find in any number of movie adaptations of Stephen King novels, including Carrie. Written and directed by Garth Maxwell, a young New Zealander, it tells the story of Jack and Dora, a young brother and sister whose mother's nervous breakdown leads to their separation and adoption by different couples. Growing up apart, the siblings cling to their childhood memories of one another, each longing for a time when they will be reunited. As the film cuts back and forth between scenes of their childhood and adolescence, it evokes their misery and isolation with a feverish intensity that recalls scenes from Hitchcock and De Palma. Dora, a misfit who is taunted at school by her classmates, begins hearing voices after suffering a serious head injury in a schoolyard fight. It is years before she comes to realize that the strange angry cries in her head are related to her brother's traumatic abuse. For while Dora has lived in relative comfort, Jack's childhood has been a continual nightmare. Adopted by a sadistic hog farmer and his wife, who live in a squalid shack with four silent, grim-faced daughters, Jack is treated as a prisoner and a pariah. No sooner has he been taken home by his new family than the four sisters grab him and force him to watch their father slaughter a pig. In the film's most agonizing moment, he is savagely whipped by the father with a length of rusted barbed wire. These and other scenes of physical and psychological torture capture primal feelings of fear and helplessness not often found in a horror film. Eventually Jack wreaks a revenge whose totality satisfyingly matches the cruelty that was visited on him. His instrument of deliverance is a primitive device he has invented that uses flashing lights to send spectators into a deep hypnotic trance. From this point on, Jack Be Nimble loses some of its ferocity as it takes more metaphysical paths. Jack and Dora finally do reunite and seek out their original parents. Although the bond between brother and sister is deep, it is troubled by Jack's unquenchable rage against the world. He is insanely possessive of his sister, who has begun an uncertain love affair with a loner named Teddy, who has telepathic abilities similar to hers. What makes Jack Be Nimble a superior genre film is that it never loses its focus on childhood trauma and obsession and their tragic repercussions. In the film's opening scenes, where the children watch their mother go crazy, we see the events mostly through their frightened, uncomprehending eyes. Curtains blowing in the wind and a children's song on the phonograph assume an ominously scary resonance that haunts them for years. It is only much later that the pieces of what actually occurred are put together, for both the viewer and the characters. In the scenes of Jack's humiliation, the images of mud, pigs and the family's glowering, hateful faces conjure the most frightening fairy-tale figures of childhood fantasy. In the end, the movie shakily aspires toward a transcendent resolution. The voices in Dora's head and her ability to transmit and receive mental calls from others, it suggests, are not just freakish abilities but latent gifts possessed by many. Jack Be Nimble becomes a cautionary fable of parental irresponsibility and its dire consequences.” — Stephen Holden, ‘Gothic Horror with a Point to Make’, New York Times, 10 June 1994

Screenings: Jack Be Nimble screened on 3 December 2008 as part of a series loosely named 'Troubled Teens.'