LANTANA Galas

From Australian director Ray Lawrence (BLISS) comes LANTANA, a deeply engaging psychological mystery about love, suspicion, insinuation and distrust, starring Anthony LaPaglia, Geoffrey Rush and Barbara Hershey.

Dr. Valerie Somers (Barbara Hershey) is a successful psychiatrist tortured by the memory of her murdered daughter. Her grief spills over into her marriage and is exacerbated by her suspicion that her uncommunicative husband is having an affair. When a missing persons case disrupts their lives, Detective lat (played with affecting rage by Anthony LaPaglia), is called in to investigate. Meanwhile, Detective Zat’s wife is worried he is having an affair, and she has been seeking professional advice from Dr. Somers.

Thanks to Lawrence’s thoughtful direction, LANTANA admirably succeeds on two intertwining levels-both as an eerie psychological murder mystery and as a deftly-realized analysis of relationships rooted in secrecy and mistrust, where what is left unsaid spawns the anger that leads us to the breaking point.