Simply A Masterpiece

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Good start, but then it gets ruined

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Parks might seem the perfect place for a pick-up. There's all those benches for starters, where a solitary individual can sit, alone, until some other solitary individual comes along, sits beside you and says hello. It's little wonder spies go there all the time, (at least in the movies). Of course, there are all kinds of pick-ups, the sexual kind being perhaps the most obvious and anyway, what's the chances of the person sitting next to you being a spy.What happens in Ana Katz's excellent "My Friend from the Park!, (she co-wrote it, directed it and stars as one of the two women at the centre), could hardly be classed as a pick-up at all. Two women with young babies get to chatting at a kid's playground the way women in such a situation might. Five minutes later they are drinking beer and one of the them is asking the other if she can use her car but not before she has run out of the resturant without paying the bill.If Katz's film isn't quite "The Hand that rocks the Cradle" it still should prove a warning about talking to strangers, even young women with babies. Less an outright thriller than a dark, psychological comedy Katz's film is horribly plausible as it depicts a world where a word out of place could have devastating consequencs. If there is a moral it's probably avoid parks altogether but if you must go into one then avoid eye-contact with anyone...and I mean anyone.