Katrina is a bitch. She confirms prejudice regarding Newcastle (for which any white-trash stereotype could be inserted) and turns up the heat. She is the counterpoint to bright, thoughtful Kiwi Celia that Barclay embodied in In My Father’s Den – Katrina is her Australian alter-ego. Brash, selfish, spiteful and quite, quite awful. Director Goldman starts with a bang, a noisy introduction scattered by the arrival of an animated text message. Even funerals aren’t safe from intruders and that’s his point: none of us are safe from Katrina. Certainly not her father in whose murder she’s been implicated. Yet this wayward daughter is a mistress manipulator whose Achilles – a distorted Electra complex born from an extreme devotion to her psychotic brother – could be her undoing. She enlists help – her long-suffering boyfriend and an enraptured half-wit among them – and lays out a plan.

Cutting up the action is a talking-head documentary that seeks to find a truth. Interviews tell different stories yet lead to the same place while explaining how an ordinary girl could grow up to be so extraordinary. The path is funny, brutal and shocking; fizzing like a bottle of cheap champagne. It is a reasonable simile given the potential that ultimately fails to pay a dividend. Disappointingly, Goldman is unwilling to draw a line between dramatic-comedy or comedy-drama, or enable us to draw our own. As if he too has been stunned by Hurricane Katrina, he takes a bet each way and leaves the moral compass swinging - a weak resolution that heightens a sense of trickery. Notwithstanding the robust talent on this project, Suburban Mayhem lingers as a cartoonish version of itself, like a cheap hangover. Tasty it is, full-bodied it’s not.

// COLIN FRASER