J Paul Johnson
A delectable debut from down under, New Zealand writer-director Michael Duignan’s first feature film The Paragon filters the comic sensibilities of Taika Waititi through a sci-fi headtrip of a narrative with canny altered-states visuals, all on a miniscule $25,000 budget and anchored by a pair of delightful lead performances. The Paragon was shot over just 13 days across April and May of 2022 in and around Auckland with friends and family. Yet, it’s more than a mere exercise in DIY filmmaking. It’s a wittily conceived, expertly comic, consistently smart, and even, by its end, emotionally moving piece of cinema.
The plot is a doozy. Shambolic, depressive, and down on his luck, tennis coach Dutch (Benedict Wall) is nearly ready to give up. His professional career fizzled out at a high ranking of 357, and since he’s been shilling (in what must surely be a nod to Brad Gilbert’s Winning Ugly) YouTube lessons coaching players how to win solely by psychological subterfuge and crass gamesmanship. Worse, Dutch learns his wife is having an affair with his adoptive brother, the circumstances of which are both funny and instructive. We first meet him at what seems like a suicidal moment. He’s covered his head with a bag and is carrying a rope ready for an apparent hanging. There’s more to this, though, than what the camera lets us see at first, especially as The Paragon‘s quirky and complex narrative unfolds.
When a drunk driver behind the wheel of a silver Toyota Corolla strikes Dutch down in the street, it looks as if he’s put out of his perpetual misery. As it turns out, though, Dutch is not just another drunk-driving casualty but a hyperdimensional being whose exceptional promise draws the attention of the mysterious, enigmatic Lyra (Florence Noble), a self-professed psychic who offers him a second chance at life. A harsh disciplinarian quick to slap Dutch’s knuckles with her ever-ready ruler, Lyra promises she can help Dutch unleash his latent powers and break the shackles of linear time. Those skills—telekinesis, telelocation, astral projection, and the like—might come in handy as Dutch ponders his psychic revenge on his brother, wife, and killer. But Lyra has in mind something of another battle. She needs Dutch’s help to find a mysterious crystal known as the Paragon before it falls into the hands of her evil brother Haxan (Jonny Brugh) and his mind-slave minions.
I told you it was a doozy.
Admittedly the plot may be a goof, but it works perfectly to contrast the film’s two leads. Wall’s Dutch is snarky, shiftless, and (almost) amoral, interested in Lyra’s offer only for the power he might exact in revenge. He’s also lazy, hoping for any shortcut that will abridge the rigorous training Lyra demands. Wall is a delight in the role from start to finish as his character starts to realize the opportunities he missed in life, and at every moment in the film his timing is perfect. As the uptight, mission-oriented, and often exasperated Lyra, Noble is equally excellent: she reminds me a bit, in looks and manner, of Kathleen Byron’s off-kilter Sister Ruth in Powell and Pressburger’s delicious Black Narcissus, a nun whose habit can’t entirely occlude the intensity of her emotion.
That Dutch and Lyra make for an engaging odd couple—his disheveled, driftless loser matched against her indomitable, uptight instruction—is just one way Duignan’s script works its magic. For all its absurdity, the powers Lyra dangles in front of Dutch give his character ample opportunity to reflect, a little like It’s a Wonderful Life, on his past choices. In particular, once he tracks down the driver of the silver Corolla that struck him, he comes to see, for the first time, the complexities of other peoples’ lives. And Lyra has family issues of her own to confront with her morbidly avuncular brother’s evil plot. She might seem frosty on the exterior, but she is a force for good with a beating heart underneath her rigid demeanor.
For a film made on the proverbial shoestring and featuring dozens of special effects conveying various psionic experiments, hyperdimensional travel, and super-powered villainy, The Paragon looks great. Some of its effects are intentionally lo-fi, and no one will mistake the film for a multi-million-dollar Marvel or DC epic, but Duignan and his team have worked a minor miracle in conveying Dutch’s space-time sojourns with an inventive, engaging, and even convincing visual design. It’s low-budget sci-fi to be sure, but it’s low-budget sci-fi that works brilliantly in keeping with the film’s dryly comic tone.
At just 83 minutes, The Paragon keeps a sprightly pace that wobbles only occasionally. Other than Haxan’s evil scheming, there are no subplots to speak of, so the script is slender and even at less than an hour and a half the film feels just a little longer than it really need be. That’s a slight knock on a film that, for next to no money spent, does almost everything right. Duignan’s talent as a writer and director are considerable, and his two leads Wall and Noble in particular are perfect as the psionic space-time travelers at the film’s center. Fueled by its clever script, engaging performances, and sprightly comedy, The Paragon is a delightfully funny rift disrupting the standard continuum of generic sci-fi narratives, doing so with panache and style.
