THIS is the second film telling the true, unhappy story about a beautiful ANU law student who murdered a handsome public servant whom she professed to love.

The first, “The Dinner Party”, written and directed by Scott Murden in 2009, spent 88 minutes fictionalising characters and events drawn from Helen Garner’s book.

At the time of its release, many Canberra people, including me, went to see it. I don’t remember how I rated it writing for a previous publisher using a previous PC. I do remember it depressing me, less for its content than for the manner of its making.

This new version, written and directed by Sotiris Dounoukos and also based on Helen Garner’s account of the case, also depressed me, but for different reasons. Its visual and dramatic values are well-crafted. The ending was the same. Joe Cinque never awoke from coffee laced with Rohypnol, boosted by an injection of heroin, both administered by a beautiful, emotionally damaged young Indian student.

Anu Singh served four years of a 10-year manslaughter sentence during which she completed a master’s degree and a PhD thesis entitled “Offending Women: Toward a Greater Understanding of Women’s Pathways Into and Out of Crime in Australia”. You’d have to admire her chutzpah as well as her eminent qualification to write about that subject. You need special dispensation to read it in Sydney University’s archives, although Singh has self-published an edited version.

I’m glad that Dounoukos has made this version. Not that it sets the record more straight than Murden’s version, but because while it sent me away with the same feeling of revulsion, disgust, dislike, for Ms Singh, I admired Maggie Naouri’s portrayal of her and Jerome Meyer’s performance as Joe.

Sacha Joseph is impressive as Madhavi Rao, whom Singh bullied into helping in preparations for the joint suicide pact that Singh intended would include her (we can never know the truth of that intention) and Joe. Madhavi was acquitted.

And Dounoukos’ images of Canberra, especially the after-dark ones, do the city proud.

At Palace Electric, Capitol 6