One of the year’s best examples of resourceful filmmaking, Michael Duignan’s fantasy comedy The Paragon was shot over just 13 days in Auckland, New Zealand for a budget of around $15,000 in U.S. dollars. After premiering to much acclaim at Rotterdam and Fantasia, Music Box Films’ genre label Doppelganger Releasing will now open it to kick off the fall and we’re pleased to exclusively debut the new trailer. The film will specifically open on September 6 in theaters at Alamo Drafthouse locations in NY, LA, Chicago, Denver, Austin, and more, as well as digitally.
“I wanted to tell a story about the most shallow person I could imagine looking for revenge but accidentally stumbling into a kind of spiritual enlightenment,” the director tells us. “I personally take these ideas seriously, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that the universe is a big cosmic joke. So it turned out a kind of buddy revenge comedy about higher consciousness.”
Here’s the synopsis: “Do you want to see the unseen? Dutch (Benedict Wall) may look like just another defeated and washed-up loser, but behind his pissed-off exterior lurks a hyperdimensional being of exceptional promise. His wife left him, his career as a tennis coach is floundering, and he would give anything to find the driver of the silver Toyota Corolla who hit him and drove off a year ago–the event that initiated Dutch’s downward spiral. Enter Lyra (Florence Noble), a witchy disciplinarian who offers to help Dutch unleash his latent psychic powers and break free from the illusion of linear time. After a crash course in telelocation and astral projection, the unlikely psionic prodigy is ready for his quest of cosmic revenge, but Lyra has other plans: she needs Dutch’s help to find a mysterious crystal known as the Paragon before it falls into the hands of her evil brother Haxan (Jonny Brugh) and his mind slaves. Everything converges towards the singularity in Michael Duignan’s feature debut, a hilarious rift in space-time.”
C.J. Prince said in his Fantasia review, “For a film about saving the universe from cosmic evil, stakes couldn’t be lower in The Paragon. What begins as a man’s quest for revenge takes a hard left into the occult and psychedelic, but its scope never expands outside of a small-town setting and smaller-minded protagonist. If anything, the film can’t get any bigger if it wanted to; writer-director-editor-cinematographer Michael Duignan shot it in less than two weeks on a budget of $25,000 New Zealand dollars (that’s around $15K in US currency). In other words: the film couldn’t afford corners let alone cut them. But The Paragon gives its all, embracing its DIY nature to deliver a light and breezy sci-fi comedy, and what it lacks in budget it more than compensates for in low-key charm.”
See the exclusive trailer below.