BLIND SIDE

Doug and Lynn (Ron Silver and Rebecca de Mornay), a young middle-class couple, return from a holiday in Mexico elated. Suddenly, a man staggers onto the road… A collision cannot be avoided. To their dismay, the man turns out to be a) dead, and b) a branch of the Mexican arm of the law. Fearing damp police cells and the future of their imminent offspring, they flee across the border to L.A. To ease their consciences and restore their peace of mind, they promptly fire their Mexican maid. Things don’t get any better when Shell (Rutger Hauer) shows up. This energetic creep forces himself on the couple by nonchalantly throwing around thinly veiled references to the accident in Mexico. Out of fear, Doug and Lynn are forced to hire him for their furniture business. Soon our pedantic psychopath throws off his cloak and begins terrorising and blackmailing the couple. Their lives become hell. Doug is forced to return to Mexico in search of Shell’s true origins.

Two hours of cat-and-mouse, in which a sociopath wreaks havoc on the idyllic life of a young couple. Work by New Zealand director Geoff Murphy has often been seen at the festival. Utu and the apocalyptic The Quiet Earth caught the eye of Hollywood producers, whereupon he was brought in for Young Guns II and Freejack. In Blind Side, Rutger Hauer (Blade Runner, The Hitcher, Ladyhawke) once again indulges in the role of a psychopath on duty. His victims are two esteemed colleagues who also made a name for themselves playing disturbed characters. Rebecca De Mornay (the psychopathic babysitter from The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, Runaway Train, Backdraft) and Ron Silver (the “sicko” from Blue Steel, Reversal of Fortune, Enemies: a Love Story) have to endure Hauer’s dangerous antics as the troubled couple Lynn and Doug.