Deep shadows and strangely shaped blocks of low light set the mood for The Fallen Mystery, an absorbing hour-long work choreographed by Zara Killeen-Chance in collaboration with the performers. She has also designed the lighting, creating a dimly lit space for innumerable encounters between a series of highly stylized, recognizably noirish characters presented by a trio of loners dressed in trench coats — two independent dames (Georgie Goater and Lisa Greenfield) who embody an array of femmes fatales, and a well-dressed bloke on the prowl (Paul Young) who ranges from vigilante man to stoic to cop on the make .

There’s no narrative as such, just a steadily morphing sequence of interactions which involve individuals lurking warily in the shadows with all senses alert, pacing watchfully, crossing paths or meeting with one another, exchanging silent words, drawing a gun, shooting and being shot, dropping dead, and coming back to life to re-enter the cycle at a new point. There are multiple entrances and exits, often making use of diagonal pathways, and floor work involving resting on one hip while being dragged by someone else. Sequences overlap at times, and there’s enough repetition and variation to imply the cinematic flashback so typical of film noir.

The pace is deliberately slow and steady, drawn out by extended freeze-frame pauses which fragment the action to the point where it feels as if you’re riffling through the pages of a graphic anthology of noir short stories. The pace gives events an edge of tension, heightened by the emotionally weighted glances so deliberately emphasized by the performers, mostly directed at the a audience rather than to one another. There’s a sense of refinement here, of things being pared back to essentials and then polished to perfection.

The carefully selected retro clothing suggests expensive high fashion of the 40 and 50s, especially that worn by stage and film stars of the era, and carries with it a strong sense of autonomy and self-reliance – a notion that these people can do whatever they put their minds to and are not to be messed about. Young’s trench coat over collar and tie, classy trousers, and brown brogues suggest Humphrey Bogart, and though Young only mimes the ever-present cigarette, he’s still very much the laconic hard-boiled PI.  White shirted-Greenfield hides her face and carefully curled hair behind the brim of a white hat worthy of Jane Greer, becoming a woman of mystery; later in her trench coat she walks the streets, and quick to seize the advantage in an encounter going wrong, she cold-heartedly levels her gun at Young and drops him with one shot. Goater strips off her trench coat to reveal a slinky blue shimmering silk dress and performs a frenzied night club solo reminiscent of Cyd Charisse in The Band Wagon (minus Fred Astaire), but at other times as she paces about in her coat she looks very much like Rita Hayworth, and in a street grapple with Young she shows her self-defence moves to great advantage.

Atmospheric music is provided live by Hermione Johnston variously playing an out-of-tune piano, grungy electronic keyboard, rusty violin, prepared piano strings, and loops of one kind or another. While not exactly noirish, her sounds do add to the feeling of things being not quite as they appear, giving an edge that keeps your ear attentive while your eyes puzzle out what’s happening on stage.

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The Fallen Mystery is a terrific piece of genre play – a chiaroscuro nightmare where Sam Spade gets spliced together with David Lynch.

Dancers Georgie Goater, Paul Young and Lisa Greenfield play, between them, a host of noir archetypes, from the hardboiled gumshoe and the slick villain to the “good woman” and the sensuous femme fatale. Zahra Killeen-Chance’s sharp-edged choreography places them within a stark, expressionistic space where passions, both carnal and murderous, play out in pools of light and inky darkness.

The low-key, stark lighting works to create large, forbidding shadows, which allude to movement in and out of the implied film frame as the well as the murky pseudo-relationship between wrong and right, while the flickering distortion of the soundscape is matched by the sometimes jerky and imbalanced movements and ragged breath-work of the performers. There’s even some well-pitched gunplay, which starts off intimate but spirals out into horrified absurdity.

The geometric movement, which takes good advantage of the broad, empty black box of The Open Stage’s performance space, is wonderfully eerie and uncanny, from the dancers’ steely glares, to their shifts in identity and gender, to the sense that violence is thrumming just beneath the surface of the angular, often constrained movements. It feels like I’m watching a film that’s playing out of sync, so that the horror is as much in the gaps and scratches as it is in the narrative itself.

This sense of disquieting cinematic instability is present from the outset; as the audience enter, musician Hermione Young extracts a haunting, disorienting soundscape from a poorly tuned piano that’s been hooked up to a crackly amplifier, and her performance on a range of instruments serves to create an exquisitely disturbing sonic backdrop that is as much a character as the dancers themselves.

I’m completely swept up by The Fallen Mystery: it’s a beautifully presented package, from the 1940s costumes to the inspired lighting and sound design, through to the thoroughly compelling narrative and physical expression of the dancers themselves.

I have one small nit-pick, though, about some of the few lines of dialogue; if something’s to be delivered in an American accent then it needs to be good and consistent, for there’s a fair amount of Kiwi poking through.

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