Mr Wrong
National Library Building, 70 Molesworth Street, Thorndon, Wellington
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Screening as part of the “Films that shaped New Zealand – Celebrating 120 Years of Cinema” series.
"Mr. Wrong" is the feature debut of Gaylene Preston, who would go on to become one of New Zealand’s leading filmmakers. Concerned with making local stories to show on the big screen, Preston’s first film "subversively reworked the familiar plot of the besieged woman" (Diane Pivac with Frank Stark and Lawrence McDonald, "New Zealand Film: An Illustrated History," p.94). It's a taut, entertaining thriller telling the story of Meg, who purchases a haunted secondhand car.
The film is based on a story by the English writer Elizabeth Jane Howard. With a nod to previous films' obsession with cars, the film was a box office success and proved there was a local audience for films with female leads, feminist themes and which played with established genre conventions.
"Preston kids along the thriller conventions she clearly enjoys, springing twists in them and interrogating the genre for its inbuilt sexism all the while treating her audience to a thoroughly spooky good time." – Bill Gosden, New Zealand Film Festival, 1985.
"It's tight and well-scripted plot exploits many of the cliches and conventions of the genre, while simultaneously turning an incisive and perceptive eye on the ideological substructure of those very conventions. Preston spotlights the inbuilt sexism of the genre and illuminates its uncomfortable preoccupations with power, sex and death, and some of the nastier links between that unholy trinity that permeates the dominant ethos” – Jo Seton, "Meg and the Space Invaders - Mr. Wrong as a Feminist Thriller," Illusions, no.2, 1986.
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