Loaded (New Zealand)

REVIEW
Jane Campion's little sister Anna makes an inauspicious directorial debut with this dreary psychological thriller, an uneventful discourse whose one-dimensional characters substitute pretense with pretension. With its film-within-a-film backdrop, the story centers on a group of friends who weekend at a country mansion to make a horror movie. As the dynamics and romantic couplings of the group change, a death underscores the participants' anxieties and uncertain allegiances. Unfortunately for director Campion, she's working from her own flat screenplay. It's one of those stories in which the viewer impatiently waits for something to happen. It doesn't. A tripping scene is about the only sequence of interest.