Indie queen Lili Taylor and up-and-coming American-Kiwi actor Stephania LaVie Owen play mother and daughter in the American art film Paper Spiders.
Despite having to commute regularly between NYC and Wellington, Stephania LaVie Owen has managed to rack up a pretty impressive CV, despite her tender years.
It helps that she looks rather younger than those years - particularly in Paper Spiders, where she plays the 17-year old New Yorker Melanie.
We meet Melanie and her widowed mother Dawn as they're shown around a California university. Melanie's excited, but Dawn is tense about it.
Is Melanie ready to leave the family home for the other side of the country? It turns out Melanie isn't the one to worry about.
Dawn - played by indie queen Lili Taylor - gets increasingly neurotic. Not adorable, New York-movie neurotic, like mum in Lady Bird. More "you need help" neurotic.
And since Dawn won't go to a psychiatrist herself, Melanie has to report on her to the school counsellor.
My hopes for the film were raised slightly with the hilariously self-absorbed Mr Wessler but sadly those sorts of comic touches proved few and far between in Paper Spiders.
The story starts when Dawn becomes convinced that the next-door neighbour is out to get her.
Melanie doesn't immediately see the signs. Maybe Mum's right. There are some creepy people out there, why shouldn't the neighbour be one of them? Maybe Paper Spiders will turn into Rear Window.
Melanie even compares notes with friends at school.
When things escalate to the point where her mother hires a private detective - one she can hardly afford, by the way - Melanie starts to realise that things are getting out of hand.
Paper Spiders was made by husband and wife film-makers Natalie and Inon Shampanier and predictably it's based on Natalie's real-life experience with her own mother.
This means that the script follows many of the paths that, I assume, she did herself. Like finding a nice, sensible Mr Right to take Dawn's mind off things. Someone like Howard in this case.
Even if such a thing could help Dawn, Melanie takes her eye off the ball when she becomes involved with her own potential "significant other".
His name's Danny, he's fresh out of rehab, with rich, frankly useless parents. So, not Mr Right then.
And all the time Dawn is getting worse. Her relationship with the neighbour deteriorates even further, she gets fired at work, she doesn't trust anyone - not even Melanie.
Whatever's wrong with her, it's clearly beyond the powers of well-meaning amateurs like Melanie to fix.)
The film is also, I have to say, a bit of a slog, with well-meaning filmmakers who assume that, because it's based on real life, "telling it like it is" is somehow the same thing as an engaging narrative.
The acting is fine, by the way, led by the always reliable Lili Taylor, and the one-to-watch Stephania LaVie Owen - another multi-syllable New Zealand star on the rise alongside Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie and Duane Wichman-Evans Junior.
I was sorry to see some of the other characters fade early in the film though, to make room for more scenes between mother and daughter.
Perhaps Paper Spiders needed a third writer, not quite so deeply invested in the real-life events, to give the film a little more depth. And also to suggest they maybe lose the title Paper Spiders.
