Certainly Heaven does not start out very interestingly. Scott Reynolds serves up a contorted plot of jealousies and betrayals, with some rather banal battles over Martin Donovan’s divorce, his fight for child custody, and various subplots concerning his psychiatrist Patrick Malahide sleeping with his wife and club owner Richard Schiff’s double-dealings. It looks more like a petty crime/slice of life drama than a genre film. Indeed the same setting could almost be the basic set-up for one of the black comedies of director Hal Hartley that star Martin Donovan regularly appears in.

However as the various plots start to unfold eventually, by about the halfway point, Heaven starts to become quite interesting. This time Reynolds has restrained his stylistic experiments tightly within the framework of a story – and they work all the better for it. There’s considerable ingenuity to Reynolds’ non-linear editing. The story is all elliptically told, often in flashbacks and flash-forwards, or where Reynolds lets us think that Heaven’s visions are part of the narrative, and sometimes where we are deceptively and misleadingly given only partial glimpses of scenes. There are some very clever scenes where people narrate flashbacks and we move from the teller telling the story to one person to cut back to the person they are talking about sitting where the listener was. The film becomes particularly interesting when we start to see the prophecy about the gambling game falling into place, something that Reynolds handles with a good deal of suspense. The film reminds considerably of Don’t Look Now (1973) and Nicolas Roeg’s games of synchronous symbolism there – although where Roeg played games with flashes of visual colour, Scott Reynolds plays games with synchronous crosscut editing, letting us see an image and then the same image falling into place later in the film. The editing schemes in the film are really quite daring.

It’s curious though what audience it was that Scott Reynolds seemed to think he was making Heaven for. The film is surprisingly enough backed by Miramax. Reynolds casts three minor American actors – Martin Donovan, Joanna Going and Richard Schiff – and one Brit – Patrick Malahide – in the central roles and fills the rest of the parts out with Kiwi locals. Not too surprisingly the range of accents is bizarrely all over the place. You’re not really sure if Reynolds has intended the film for local markets or international – certainly the international actors use a lot of Kiwi colloquial references that shows that the film hasn’t entirely been shaped for American consumption.