Alan Steadman, a successful urban lawyer, leaves behind his city practice after the death of his much-loved grandfather. His inheritance involves the administering of the charitable Steadman Trust.

However, other members of the law firm have vested interests in proving him unfit to caretake such a large amount of money. They drag up the old insanity-in-the-family standby when he irrationally takes time off and drives through-the-night to a deserted and rundown Victorian mansion in a very out of the way place.

What, on the surface, appears as a routine escape from everyday pressures, for space and time to re-evaluate his life and his future, can easily be re-interpreted as a major nervous breakdown especially since his mother requires care.

Alan may be running away and behaving strangely, but he is sane enough to remember his cellphone. There is no point in biting the umbilical that feeds.

It is really no surprise that John Day, making his debut as feature film director, is impressive. He brings with him 23 years' experience as cameraman with TVNZ and many NZ films, including Goodbye Pork Pie, Beyond Reasonable Doubt and The Scarecrow. Matte Box Films, formed with his partner, producer Trishia Downie, has won five major awards for their more than 350 commercials, rock videos and documentaries.

The experience and tightness shows onscreen. The opening of the movie is highly understated. The credits are the same simple white letters on a black screen, so beloved by Woody Allen.

Only here the screentime is not wasted on a theme tune. Sure it begins with music, but we soon find it comes from a clock radio. Sound continues in the best radio play tradition and we follow someone through the process of getting ready for work, ending up listening to the same radio programme in a traffic-jammed car. So tightly edited and with such economy.

Day co-wrote the screenplay with Arthur Baysting as an adaptation of a story by Simon Willisson. The story is of an intriguing unfolding mystery with two disparate but parallel storylines subtly interweaving.

It is confusing and unexpected. The approach of the screenplay is often cleverly cyclical. As Alan Steadman, (Philip Gordon) is stuck in traffic, his cellphone rings in his car. He gets out and runs through the stationary lines of cars to find the blockage is because of an ambulance tending his grandfather, which was the reason for the phone call.

The Returning is an excellent erotic/psychological/supernatural thriller and shows yet again the debt we all owe to Hitchcock. Baysting makes an uncredited drive-on cameo as a cabdriver and the extraordinary house recalls THE Psycho house, but The Returning is a very New Zealand movie in that it obliquely explores New Zealandisms.

This house is not American Gothic, behind a motel off a motorway. It is a homage to the local brickmaker's art and very much a rural homestead. Production designer Michael Becroft and cinematographer Kevin Hayward have manipulated local icons.

The friendly, schmaltzy, comfortable farmhouse of our childhood memories becomes the definitive haunted house, just as our first old car became the nightmare with the ubiquitous leg of lamb in the boot in Mr Wrong.

Horror comes not from sharks or spiders but from the inherent possibilities of a wayward Buzzy Bee with amplified sound. Even our friendly old red hen gets re-interpreted. Chicken Licken now eats a rat while she is waiting for the sky to fall on her head.

The National Film Unit-style of filming the car roaring down the country road in beautiful New Zealand is abandoned for a more creepy distorted use of landscape with strange compositions. Pretty open spaces like rippling golden barley fields develop sinister overtones, just as quirky rural eccentricity conceals bizarre pasts.

Clive Cockburn's filmscore is brilliantly over-the-top Hollywood/mini-series melodrama, romantically and lushly uderscoring the emotion of the moment.

There is great use of the old silent movie technique of the static camera, where the edges of the screen are like the pro-scenium arch in a theatre, with wings beyond. The actor moves in and out of the frame, while we sit looking at the stage opening. When Alan first wanders around the old house, the camera stays in the hallway waiting for him to come out of the side rooms. While he is out of sight there is great tension. We have to concentrate and listen in case something happens off screen. Itis like playing ghosts or hide-and-seek with the audience.

NZ has not yet found its Mel Gibson or its Tom Cruise. We have tried to find a young male hunk star equivalent in actors like KellyJohnston and Michael Hurst, but they have never really taken off into international stardom. While The Returning has a strong ensemble cast, it is a vehicle for Philip Gordon. He looks so good on film and has the right softness and vulnerability coupled with an endearing sensuality.

Maybe it's his turn this time.

* John Parker is Metro magazine's film writer.