Jack Be Nimble

In director Garth Maxwell’s 1993 gothic horror twins Jack and Dora (late US actor Alexis Arquette and Kiwi Sarah Smuts-Kennedy) are separated while young; their adult reunion sees them battling the trauma of their past while being pursued by Jack’s sadistic step sisters. Complete with ESP, and a steam-driven hypnosis machine, Maxwell makes an exuberant and surreal contribution to the cinema of unease. New York Times’ Stephen Holden lauded the heady head-spinner as “a superior genre film” with a “feverish intensity that recalls scenes from Hitchcock and De Palma.” 

The Gothic horror film Jack Be Nimble has a hallucinatory power and psychological refinement that you won't find in any number of movie adaptations of Stephen King novels, including Carrie. [...] As the film cuts back and forth between scenes of their childhood and adolescence, it evokes their misery and isolation with a feverish intensity that recalls scenes from Hitchcock and De Palma.

– Stephen Holden, New York Times, 10 June 1994

Key Cast & Crew

Garth Maxwell

Writer, Director

Sarah Smuts-Kennedy

As: Dora

Donald Duncan

Cinematographer

Jonathan Dowling

Producer

Kelly Rogers

Producer

Bridget Armstrong

As: Typing Teacher