There is an inspiring sudden surge of fresh talent in Australian cinema. Sarah Watt’s directing debut, Look Both Ways, is as bold and idiosyncratic as John Hillcoat’s visceral treatment of Nick Cave’s script for The Proposition. Her “romantic comedy” is far less brutal on the eye, but just as cruel about fate and mortality.

The plot hinges on moments that reach into the past to explain the future, and the dis-astrous consequences of crossing a road — or a rail-track — without looking both ways.

For a lonely artist (Justine Clark), the inability to do both at the same time becomes something of an obsession. The sudden death of her father merely underlines the point. She can barely take ten consecutive steps down a pavement without being assaulted by a nightmarish vision of a ghastly accident that flickers before our eyes in shivering crayon animation. Clark expects the worst, and it duly happens when she witnesses the death of a young man crushed by a train.

The two journalists assigned to the case by the local newspaper bring their own hidden woes. Nick (William McInnes), the photographer, has just been told that he has an irreversible strain of testicular cancer. Andy (a wonderful clown performance by Anthony Hayes), is a redneck reporter who has inadvertently impregnated his Aboriginal mistress.

Their fears eat into the very fabric of the film. Nick’s waking thoughts are plagued by a blizzard of microscopic cancer cells. Andy is morbidly fascinated by hapless young fathers who top themselves for seemingly trivial reasons. Anna (Lisa Flannigan), the pregnant maternity nurse, wonders whether she should abort Andy’s baby or take off to foreign parts.

It feels like a film with my name on it. It fingers a host of issues that will torture any couple over the age of 35. The ingenuity is how this first-time director articulates these conscious fears with such stylised and intuitive effects. Her script clearly owes much to Ray Lawrence’s Aussie wonder, Lantana (2001), in the way it massages the four main characters’ sense of guilt, but the unsettling graphics that haunt the cast like bad hang overs are all her own work. I’m deeply wary of films that rely so heavily on human symmetry to make such clean points, but the novelty and artistic daring are utterly worthy of the extra star I’ve awarded it.

JAMES CHRISTOPHER

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