This movie left me feeling anything but gutted! Great film. Great use of genre. Great lead performance. Great sfx. Great ending. I was thoroughly impressed with this devilishly delightful film. It was squeamish and gleeful at once. Well done to the art/props team for such convincing, comedic and coronary guts! Matter of fact, well done to the whole team’s guts! Very Olivia Rodrigo coded. Particularly the failed proposal - which was an excellent emotional centre to the film. Perfectly played in all its nuances by the star. Bravo!

Masters at work here! A fantastic story, it feels like a great anecdote you’d hear at a dinner party. The performance from the lead actress was fantastic. Completely convincing. The camera work is scrumptious and enhanced by a beautiful colour grade. The structure was perfect. The highlight of the film for me was the performance by the Pastor. Their use of profanity was like the climax to a spiritual conflict AND a great punchline. Well done!

I was hypnotised by this enigma of a film. It was resonant and strangely salient for a film that so tantalisingly dances away from comprehension. The thematic concern of the rising sea levels and humanity’s ability to destroy ourselves was sewn into the film. The documentarian aspects of it fuse with the narrative aspects of it to create an interesting kind of third space. I think it is an exciting thing to create something new or inventive or original so I praise this team. Well done!

Excellent style. Very well done.

Interesting film, all done on greenscreen I suspect adding a sort of charm to the film. I like the sense of humor and the costume was fantastic.

As an Onslow alumni, I was super proud to see that Evil Cutlery took the prize for Best National School Team this year! I hadn't seen the film until now, and I was curious to see what the standard was for school teams in this very competitive year. If you're wondering what the answer is: it's bloody fantastic! This is very confident filmmaking from Rowan and crew, featuring a fun concept, great acting, bold editing and cinematography (great colour grading decisions too!) while keeping the most important thing about this competition at the forefront: simplicity. This team is setting the bar to a very high standard, and if this is what these rangatahi are creating now I think we've got some big laughs coming ahead over the next few years of this festival.

The presentation of this film shows that this team knows what they are doing technically. The locations are well selected, and filmed at just the right time of day to convey the right emotion. The acting is also solid and engaging. The only thing I would say is that it wasn't clear to me what was happening with the story. You've got the lovers on the run, but I didn't feel like it had a solid emotional core.

I've been sitting and thinking about this film for months and months, umming and ahhing about the thoughts in my brain versus what comes out of my keyboard here. Because ultimately for me this does a number of things better than almost any film I've ever seen in the competition from a technical point of view, but the disjointed, conjoining stylised fairytale narrative genuinely had me scratching me head.

I'm not trying to make this a hot take but this might be the great trailer ever produced in 48 Hours.

The camerawork, direction, edit, grade, sound, music and performances are phenomenal. The coverage is out of this world and yet from a narrative point of view our central conceit is that twin flames will go any lengths for the other person?

Having said that yes it is delivered with nuanced tone and intensity to the point where we buy what you're selling as viewers. The onscreen journey is riveting, uptempo and engaging. There is also a heavy resolution of reality, more akin to BADLANDS than the structural nods to TRUE ROMANCE and NBK that one might expect here.

But honestly being technically so good I was frustrated by the lack of narrative depth to the plot, and felt that being so open ended in nature hurt the story because it made the tech wizardry overshadow the story. And story is king in 48.

I've watched this a few times now and I love the performances and the style. Definitely one of my favourite teams in Wellington