Audrey film review: Life changes with a kid in a coma

When their high maintenance daughter falls into a coma, a family enjoys a new-found freedom in her absence.

Jackie van Beek in Audrey.

The audacious Australian black comedy Audrey asks a question that some parents may think but rarely articulate: Would we be better off without our children? Not as in leaving home but as in being dead.

Even in Richard Donner’s 1976 horror movie The Omen, Gregory Peck and Lee Remick liked their son for quite a while, and he turned out to be the literal son of Satan. Perhaps they knew that in the third instalment he’d be Sam Neill, and what’s not to like about him?

In the film under review the devilish child is Audrey Lipsick (Josephine Blazier), who is almost 18 and full of herself. She attends a performing arts school at the insistence of her mother, Ronnie Miller (Kiwi actor Jackie van Beek), a one-time Logie winner whose star has faded.

“We all know the truth,” Audrey yells at her mother during a confrontation in the family home. “You’re a shit actress and you know it. You just quit before anyone else noticed.”

Ronnie, who still uses her stage name, asks her carpenter husband, Cormack Lipsick (Jeremy Lindsay Taylor) if that is true and if “everything TV Week has ever written about me has been a lie?” He is wisely diplomatic.

The couple has a younger daughter, Norah (Hannah Diviney), who has cerebral palsy and is in a wheelchair. It’s in front of Norah that her mother declares “Audrey has special needs”. That is, she’s a trainee actor.

Everything changes when Audrey falls on the roof and goes into a coma. Suddenly, Ronnie, Cormack and Norah start living it up. The couple’s limp sex life returns with a bang, including in unexpected locations. “She’ll never know,’’ Cormack says of his comatose daughter.

“Isn’t it nice,’’ Ronnie asks her husband, “just you and me and Norah.”

Norah receives the attention usually bestowed on Audrey, including from Audrey’s boyfriend, Max (Fraser Anderson). “I don’t want to be defined,’’ he proclaims, as the guy whose girlfriend is in a coma because I am so much more than that.’’ He expands his self-definition in a way that made me laugh out loud. “I am a poet.”

Cormack befriends a lay preacher (Aaron Fa’aoso) who makes “Christian couples” porn videos on the side. One of them re-imagines bringing the head of John the Baptist.

Then Ronnie joins the drama school, posing as her daughter. Her card for casting agents, which includes a photograph, puts her age range at 13-25, which leads to laughs — and the truth of the matter — when a video of her goes viral.

All the performances are good, especially from van Beek. The script (Lou Sanz) is sharp and acerbic and the direction (Natalie Bailey in her feature debut) is wacky and pacy. The sex scenes in particular are playfully provocative.

The overwhelming question is will Audrey come out of the coma.

The day the family receives the yes or no call from the hospital sums up the film. “It’s Audrey,’’ says Ronnie, who is wearing a strap-on penis. Cormack is bent over the bed.

Is she alive or dead?

Either way, what happens next? The director has two choices: keep pushing the line to humorously uncomfortable places or retreat to a more serious moral conclusion.

I won’t reveal which she chooses, but I will add that this rambunctious film ends with Ronnie on stage performing Euripides’s Medea, and we know what that Greek enchantress does to her kids.