Superbly anchored by Hugh Laurie, Mr Pip is a brave and subtly ambitious drama

Set in Papua New Guinea, Mr Pip is a movie coming from a good place, destined to take you to a bad place

Hugh Laurie as Mr Watts reading to his students in a scene from the film .

MR PIP

Rating: 3 stars

Director: Andrew Adamson (The Chronicles Of Narnia)

Starring: Hugh Laurie, Xzannjah, Healesville Joel, Eka Darville

Adapted from the best-selling novel by Lloyd Jones, Mr Pip is a movie coming from a good place, destined to take you to a bad place.

While in no way a total downer of an experience, it still might be wise to steel yourself for a few severe jolts along the way.

The setting is Bougainville Island, in the east of Papua New Guinea.

It is here, in the late 1980s, that a dispute between PNG military separatists and foreign mining interests has escalated into a desperate situation for the local community.

Cut off from the outside world, and unfairly bearing the brunt of a brutal government crackdown, the good people of Bougainville are quite rightly fearing the worst.

Whenever the authorities pay a visit, one face in particular stands out in the crowd. He is the only white man left living on Bougainville since the crisis took hold.

Mr Watts (Hugh Laurie) is an Englishman, a former actor married to a local woman. A quiet, socially awkward man, Watts has reluctantly accepted the role of community schoolteacher in the absence of anyone better qualified.

Much of his curriculum is centred on reading aloud from the classic Charles Dickens novel Great Expectations.

This seemingly quaint choice of book (and the power of its prose) goes on to have fateful implications for the future of all on Bougainville Island.

In particular, an inquisitive young girl named Matilda (impressively played by newcomer Xzannjah). The highly emotive approach employed by writer-director Andrew Adamson in telling this story will not be to all tastes.

An unorthodox combination of magic realism (where Matilda re-imagines the Dickens yarn on Bougainville) and explicit violence (the regular visits by government forces are frightening in their authenticity) does take some considered processing. on the part of the viewer.

However, having lived in PNG for an extended period in his youth, it is clear that Adamson has a grasp of this unusual part of the world that many filmmakers would not.

A superb anchoring performance by Laurie does help simplify some of the complex themes in play, when necessary.

While the film does have some obvious problems arriving at a satisfactory ending, it still earns its keep as a brave and subtly ambitious drama in its best stretches.