A small but charming essay on small-town family relationships, where we know the people but never know them. In this case, the circumscribed life of the inner suburbs of Adelaide, South Australia, just across the Parklands of the title. Apparently calm and bucolic, the parklands seethe with strange happenings, and this policeman dad knew something, something dangerous or merely odd? His daughter just has to find out, what is this strange compulsion? A cross between KINGS ROW and Virginia Woolf, Cate Blanchett displaying that fey fragility, the faded thirties elegance of a going-nowhere colonial capital, an unresolved air of mystery -- a satisfying fifty-minuter with a young star who soon made it big.
