Screen grabs: best of the small screen

FREE-TO-AIR

SAFE HARBOUR, MARCH 7, SBS, 8.30PM

A terrific ensemble cast and and a very topical slant make this four-part thriller compelling viewing. Ewen Leslie, Phoebe Tonkin, Jacqueline McKenzie, Joel Jackson and Leeanna Walsman​ play a group of friends whose yachting holiday changes the course of their lives when they encounter a stalled fishing boat overloaded with asylum seekers trying to get to Australia. There are too many to take on board, and the group doesn't want authorities to send them back to Indonesia. After a vote, they decide, despite the danger, to tow the fishing boat. But after a night at sea, they awake to find the boat gone; the yacht's life jackets are missing and the rope between the two vessels has been cut. Five years later, one of the asylum-seekers, Ismail (Hazem Shammas​) is driving a cab in Australia when he picks up Ryan (Esen Leslie), who invites his family to a reunion of sorts. Through a series of flashbacks we slowly learn the consequences of what happened, and why the lives of everyone involved will never be the same. But just who cut the rope – and why – remains the question. Much more than just a whodunit, Safe Harbour explores some very modern questions of ethics and humanity. KN

DVD

ANTI MATTER (Bounty) M

This first feature from British writer-director Keir Burrows is the kind of cerebral science fiction that has you ticking off its influences as you watch, including Christopher Nolan's Memento and Shane Carruth's Upstream Colour. The clearest parallel of all is with the two versions of The Fly, which share the premise of a teleportation device going wrong with terrible consequences for its inventor. The inventor, in this case, is Ana (Yaiza Figueroa​), a Spanish chemist doing research at Oxford, who makes the mistake of experimenting on herself – and soon begins to fall apart, albeit psychologically rather than physically. Obvious borrowings aside, the weaknesses here include some smarmy sitcom dialogue and a slightly disappointing ending: Ana's immigrant background puts her at an unspoken distance from her very British colleagues (Philippa Carson and Tom Barber-Duffy) but the class theme, like a competing religious one, comes to less than might be hoped. All the same, Burrows' artfully disjointed storytelling creates an experience which is involving on at least two levels – as a logic puzzle, and as an unsettling metaphor for a descent into something like schizophrenia. JW

STREAMING

EVERYTHING SUCKS!, NETFLIX, SEASON ONE AVAILABLE NOW.

After the '80s-fueled nostalgia of Stranger Things comes this '90s-set high school comedy-drama, set in the small-town Boring High School in Oregon (Boring is, incidentally, a real town). It's a teen drama, but will appeal to Stranger Things fans, or those who remember Judd Apatow's late-1990s Freaks and Geeks. It follows two cliques at Boring High in 1996 – the geeky AV Club (back in the days of VHS tapes), and the drama club kids, who are thrown together to work on a joint project. In the first few episode the '90s references come thick and fast – the lead trio of nerds, Luke (Jahi Di'Allo Winston), Tyler (Quinn Liebling) and McQuaid (Rio Mangini) talk about the coming Star Wars prequels, Luke's love interest Kate (Peyton Kennedy) is a Tori Amos fan, there are troll dolls and scrunchies – but these soon settle down and soon you won't notice that all the flannel shirt-clad teens are not constantly texting each other. The storylines – Kate struggles with her sexuality, everyone is trying to deal with their teen angst – are not exactly groundbreaking (although we'd rarely have seen a gay teen character in the real '90s) but as a savvy coming-of-age comedy-drama it's sweet and engaging. KN

CLASSIC

WINCHESTER '73 (Shock) G

James Stewart plays the vengeful hero of Anthony Mann's 1950 western, but the real lead character is the gun of the title, which passes through the hands of various tough guys who revere it as the ultimate symbol of authority. There are no prizes for guessing what a psychoanalyst would make of this, and Mann himself seems well aware of what he's doing: the basically simple plot is the pretext for a series of displays of male prowess and sadism, including a public shooting contest, a home invasion with the youthfully sour Shelley Winters as chief victim, and a battle with marauding "Indians" culminating in a veritable orgy of carnage (one of the young braves, believe it or not, is played by a young, shirtless Rock Hudson). Mann revels in all this machismo, which feeds his keen eye for visual drama, but is honest enough not to shy away from showing its tragic consequences. The conscience of the film is Stewart, a rare master of the art of acting on three levels – a gentle manner masking a steeliness masking the more agonised insecurity beneath. JW