“Marty and Gina are a couple of Wellington junkies. They live in Roseneath with Marty’s devoted mother, Joyce. All Marty and Gina ever want is to get stoned. This can take some organising, which usually involves their shooting buddy Nick the Greek, who owns the car. As the film gets under way the police suspect that Marty knows more than he’s letting on to anyone about a Mt Victoria homicide.
“THE SHIRT is a caustically funny account of addict monomania. Boasting the most spectacularly dysfunctional family of the [Wellington Film] Festival, the film’s hair-raising domestic scenes play like compacted, scathing parodies of family life, reminiscent of the great Mike Leigh of Meantime. Brian Sergent is at his most hypnotically psycho as the corrupted apple of his mother’s eye. Kirsty King-Turner as the pretty, feckless Gina and Irene Wood as the blowsy, nostalgia-ridden Joyce warily circle their sneering pet, each blaming the other, rather than the boy himself, for his worst excesses.
“As the plausible Nick, their fetcher and gatherer, Jeffrey Szusterman seems the thick-skinned, steady foil to their lurid ménage. Szusterman’s impressive performance reveals the truth about Nick’s steadiness gradually.
“THE SHIRT, directed by the perpetually youthful Wellington film and television veteran John Laing, is the first feature film screenplay by Wellington writer Ross Bevan. His short film, also entitled The Shirt [F82967], concerned itself with the aforementioned homicide and screened at the 1999 Wellington Film Festival. The much expanded version, which begins with Marty passing fake $100 bills in several Courtenay Place bars, is zealously intent on jolting its audience into recognising stuff that Bevan knows for certain is going on right under their – our – noses. There’s B-movie fervour in the dire outcome of the thriller plot, but the more effectively salutary elements of THE SHIRT are the Roseneath kitchen-sink horror-shows. Like two other films in the Festival – Chopper and Brigands – the best of THE SHIRT gazes in amazement upon the tragic stupidity of the depraved.” - Twenty-Ninth Wellington Film Festival (2000); www.nzff.co.nz; retrieved 09/03/2006
For the original short version, see F82967, THE SHIRT (Danny Mulheron, 1998, 12 mins)