Chapeau to Embeth Davidtz, the US-born, South Africa-raised actress who played Miss Honey in the Nineties Matilda and Renée Zellweger’s love rival in Bridget Jones’s Diary, and here delivers a directorial debut of uncommon ambition. It’s set in Rhodesia, soon to be Zimbabwe, in early 1980, where a community of bigoted and heavily armed white farmers drink themselves into seedy oblivion while awaiting an imminent election win for Robert Mugabe and fearing the bloody wrath of militant guerillas. This is not, in short, the colonial exoticism of White Mischief or Richard E Grant’s Wah-Wah. It is, instead, a place of infectious moral decay that is bleak, decrepit and grimy.

No one is more grimy than the white child protagonist Bobo, played by the local actress Lexi Venter (who was seven at the time of shooting) in a fearsomely energetic turn. Bobo is a filth-covered portrait of both freedom and neglect, and is consistently captured smoking stolen cigarettes, drinking beer, swearing, riding a mini motorbike and cruelly threatening African workers with, “Hey! My dad bought this farm with his own money. I could fire you if I wanted!”

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Bobo is the daughter of a soldier and absentee father, Tim Fuller (Rob Van Vuuren), and a brittle alcoholic mother, Nicola (Davidtz). Most of the film, adapted by Davidtz from Alexandra Fuller’s memoir, traces the gradual implosion of the Fuller family in the face of wholesale political upheavals.

There’s much to admire, including Venter’s performance, Davidtz’s artful framing (the film was shot outside of Johannesburg) and her refusal to sympathise or ennoble the Fullers — these are complicated characters, but they’re also hard work. The final act is less effective, especially when Nicola spirals into brandy-addled mania, and it all starts to get very Tennessee Williams, like Blanche DuBois has been beamed into colonial Rhodesia with a silken nightdress and a visceral hatred of racial equality. Still, it’s always compelling, and a powerful first feature.
★★★☆☆
15, 99min
In cinemas

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