Maybe at this point I’ve become a bit jaded because Brandon Christensen’s Z shouldn’t work as well as it does.

The movie starts out deceptively simple, sort of like The Bad Seed (1956) or The Good Son (1993) – stories revolving around murderous, psychotic children – then with barely the blink of an eye changes to The Babadook (2014) THEN morphs into The Entity (1982).

And it’s not that it does so almost seamlessly that’s so amazing, but that it manages to do so without feeling overstuffed or that the writers of the screenplay should maybe have restrained themselves because for me one of the worse feelings you can get from a movie is being manipulated, from feeling the screenwriters and directors pullings strings behind the scenes.

It’s worth mentioning that the minute you start feeling that way about a movie, it’s failed because that suspension of belief is important.

And did I mention that it as co-stars the great Stephen McHattie?

Though Z is very much the story of Elizabeth Parsons (Keegan Connor Tracy) and her son, Joshua (Jett Klyne) and despite the bulk of the movie centered around their characters, they carry it remarkably well.

Though as much credit should go to director Brandon Christensen – who co-wrote it with Colin Minihan – because he manages to somehow take ideas we’ve seen many times before yet jigger things enough that you don’t think you’re watching ideas that have been around for quite awhile.