Country Gothic bleeds into a kind of soapie telemovie, with nods to half a dozen other genres. An action scene positions Blake as a gun-toting Sarah Connor figure. Crime mystery protocols necessitate red herrings and concealed identities. Horror tropes also emerge. ‘We don’t go in there,’ The Writer says, gesturing to her father’s old study. Quickly, the promise of an intelligent, character-driven, suspenseful drama gives way completely to a convoluted novel-within-a film concept.

Susie Porter in The Second (Stan)

However rocky the film’s generic orientation, the tone never wavers, settling on melodramatic self-seriousness where a more camp tone would have acknowledged and complemented the plot’s less plausible turns. Pulp, after all, demands pulp treatment. Evidently, Australian cinema’s B-movie traditions expired long ago. As The Second wears on, more and more exposition is delivered in text read from The Writer’s draft novel. Unmoored from any coherent grounding, the characters’ behaviour becomes ever more inexplicable. Even an actor as skilled and self-possessed as Blake – whose onscreen persona often projects tough women who refuse to ask to be liked – cannot reassure us as her character’s motivations shift from scene to scene.

At the Sydney Film Festival première in June 2018, writer and producer Stephen Lance described his script as a ‘hall of mirrors, twisting turning thriller’, while first-time director Mairi Cameron spoke of her vision of a ‘fabulous, dark, wicked, scandalous’ tale of ‘survivors’ and ‘damaged women’.

But The Second is not the only recent Australian story to deliver muddled sexual politics amid contemporary screen culture’s gender Zeitgeist. The secrets of ABC’s Mystery Road series were unlocked by an Indigenous girl lying about the identity of the paedophile who raped her. Here, The Writer’s creative block is unbolted by recalling her teen traumas with The Muse, which involve a sexual encounter with a local boy. Digging into rather than subverting common conventions of seductresses and femme fatales, the plotline unfolds with such a lack of clarity that it is hard to know what The Second saying about the sexual power, or disempowerment, of teen girls.

Vince Colosimo in The Second (Stan)

While Presto and Dendy Direct have already disappeared from the streaming market, Stan has emerged as Netflix’s main commercial competitor in Australia. The latter has little interest in producing local films, but Stan’s brand is built on its involvement in Australian small screen culture. The Second’s première followed the company’s announcement, in June, that it has three further original television productions underway, along with exclusive deals with two Hollywood studios.

Filmmakers and industry analysts have long been anticipating the first local film made by a streaming platform. It stands as something of a flagship product for Stan. Now The Second has arrived and it’s a calamity – an Australian version of a US Lifetime film. Are the streaming wars really going to be fought over bespoke telemovies? Are original stories by streaming platforms likely to be much more than a algorithm-mandated need for more content to fill an online catalogue? It matters, because as more of screen culture shifts to streaming platforms, it seems they may not just decouple film from the cinema-going experience, but change the kinds of films that are being crafted. Whether Stan and other streaming providers are up to the task of consistently shepherding quality cinema to small screens remains to be seen.

The Second, 94 minutes, screened at the Sydney Film Festival on 9 and 10 June 2018, and will be showing in cinemas from 5 July and on Stan from 20 July.

ABR Arts is generously supported by The Ian Potter Foundation and the ABR Patrons.