Crush Review

Crush
Lane and Christina are involved in a car crash on the way to interview a reclusive novelist, Colin. Christina is left brain-damaged, but Lane is unhurt and goes to see Colin. Colin falls for Lane, but Lane has already fallen for his 15-year-old daughter, Angela and relations very quickly sour.

by Marcus Trower |
Published on
Release Date:

01 Jan 1992

Running Time:

115 minutes

Certificate:

15

Original Title:

Crush

In this mildly engaging psychological drama, Lane (Harden), a sexy siren with postbox red lips the size of a sofa, writes off her car but walks away unscathed while her journalist friend Christina (Rees) is cabbaged.

Not one for guilt-motivated hospital visits with grapes and flowers in hand, Lane instead calls on Colin (Zappa), the pained writer Christina was travelling to interview, and becomes a mentor to his unworldly and boyish 15-year-old daughter Angela (Bossley). Their friendship sours, however, when Colin, too, falls for her charms, and Angela finds out about Christina, whose recovering mind she poisons against her erstwhile friend, leading to a fraught act of revenge.

Director Maclean attempts to cook a dark and disturbing psychological pie from these ingredients with lukewarm results. While the idea is to partly condemn Lane for lacking a conscience, it is, in fact, too easy to side with her worldly resilience, an opinion further cemented by Harden's ballsy, charismatic and seductive performance. And the overly ambitious script never quite spits out what's on its mind, leaving its central ideas hazily implied.

Though this is often as murky as the bubbling New Zealand mud springs Maclean cuts to in order to underscore the otherworldly ambiance, in the finale, at least, we're served a fine slice of jittery tension

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