Your patience will be tried by this well-meaning but witteringly self-absorbed drama in a small New Zealand town, in which touristy panoramas of the landscape are given ponderous emphasis and characters do sensitive things like hold a starfish up to the light and gaze at it.

Matthew MacFadyen plays Paul, a star photojournalist who comes home when his father dies and decides to hang around for a bit, scandalising the community by forming a close and protective friendship with a local teenage girl Celia (Emily Barclay). Old wounds are reopened and fresh ones inflicted. Oddly, however, the story is structured so that Paul's family secrets are revealed in flashback - but the truth about Paul's current friendship with Celia unfolds in flashback too, thus diminishing its impact and narrative grip. The ambient chill-out mood of emotional injury doesn't help. There's a desperately thankless role for Miranda Otto as the clenched and unhappy sister-in-law.