Sensitive take on tragic tale a stunning watch
Film allows many facets of curse-lifting death to be heard
It is still difficult to comprehend the case of Janet Moses, the 22-year-old Wainuiomata woman who died by drowning in an attempt by her family members to lift a makutu, or curse, in 2007.
The events of that week in October — and the subsequent High Court manslaughter trial of nine extended family members in 2009 — are given a thoughtful dramatic re-examination in TVNZ 1’s most recent Sunday Theatre feature Belief: The Possession of Janet Moses.
Like last year’s Sunday Theatre highlight The Monster of Mangatiti, Belief is a docudrama, combining dramatic re-enactments with real documentary interviews. The result is a perfectly weighted and totally compelling piece of cinema which has the gut-wrenching tension and dread of a horror movie, while at the same time offering considered insights into how such a tragedy occurred.
Director David Stubbs does all this in a little over an hour, approaching the story in a way that is clinical and efficient, but determinedly open-minded.
It begins on a Saturday with the extended whanau celebrating her sister’s 21st birthday at a hotel bar. Moses, played by Kura Forrester, is unusually quiet and withdrawn — her grandmother, to whom she was very close, had recently died. That, combined with relationship problems, would have been “significant stressors” according to forensic psychiatrist Dr Rees Tapsell, one of the film’s interview subjects.
On Sunday things start getting worse. Moses is behaving erratically, convinced a white stone lion statue her sister had stolen weeks earlier from outside another hotel is possessed by some demonic spirit. “All of the evidence