Two Week With The Queen

Getting Started With Two Week With The Queen

The 1995 Australian film Two Weeks With The Queen is a straightforward dramatic film directed by Colin Eggleton, based on Colleen McGlade's stage play. It stars John Wood as a widowed man struggling to reconnect with his teenage son while the boy forms an unlikely friendship with a young woman who has cerebral palsy. The film runs about 1 hour and 30 minutes. It won several Australian Film Institute awards and was reasonably well received but never became a mainstream hit. If you are looking to watch it, your options depend on where you are located because streaming availability shifts constantly. In Australia, it has periodically appeared on SBS On Demand and sometimes Netflix Australia. Internationally it shows up sporadically on platforms like Amazon Prime Video or Apple TV for rental. Your best move is to check JustWatch or a similar aggregator for your region right now, since these things change without warning. I tried locating it last year and had to dig through three different region-locked pages before finding a rental option on Google Play. It cost about $3.99 AUD. Worth it if you are curious, not really worth hunting across multiple services unless you already subscribe to one that has it. The DVD release exists and is still available used on sites like eBay and Amazon Marketplace. The picture quality on the DVD is decent but not spectacular. It is a 4:3 aspect ratio transfer, which feels a bit narrow compared to modern framing. The audio is fine for dialogue-driven drama. I bought a copy years ago specifically to avoid the buffering issues that happen when you stream older Australian titles through some platforms. The disc played without a hitch on my aging player.

What Actually Happens In The Film

Michael King (played by John Wood) is a rough-edged truck driver whose wife has recently died. His son Charlie (Nathan Page) is dealing with his own grief and resents his father for being emotionally distant. Charlie begins volunteering at a community center where he meets Lorraine (Toni Collette), a young woman with cerebral palsy who communicates with difficulty but has sharp wit and dry humor. Their interactions become the emotional core of the story. Michael and Charlie gradually learn to communicate with each other through Lorraine's influence, though the film avoids making this resolution overly neat or sentimental. The screenplay keeps things grounded. There is no dramatic orchestral swelling when something emotional happens. The camera stays fairly static. Colin Eggleton clearly wanted realism over artifice, and that choice mostly works. My main criticism is that the middle section drags slightly. Characters circle the same emotional beats a few too many times before moving forward. This is typical of stage adaptations where the rhythm comes from dialogue exchanges rather than cinematic pacing.

Performance Notes

Toni Collette was relatively early in her career here and gives one of her most restrained performances. She plays Lorraine without pity or inspiration-porn framing, which was notable for Australian cinema in 1995. John Wood delivers a solid turn as well, keeping his character's emotional wall visibly up until it slowly comes down. Nathan Page holds his own as the perspective character. Supporting performances from non-Professional actors playing Lorraine's family and the community center staff add authenticity but occasionally feel uneven in quality. If you are studying disability representation in Australian film, this is worth watching with that lens in mind. The film made some progressive choices for its time by treating Lorraine as a full person rather than a narrative device, but it also has moments where the framing slips into familiar territory. The scene where Lorraine gets sick and the others panic reveals some blind spots in the writing that modern viewers will notice immediately.

Technical Details And Where It Falls Short

The cinematography by Ken Seng is workmanlike. Natural lighting dominates, which suits the story's everyday setting. The score by Richard Harvey is minimal, stepping in only when the narrative demands a clear emotional push. Editing is functional without being interesting. You are not going to find this on any "best edited films" list, and that is fine for what it is. I ran into a specific issue when trying to find a good-quality stream a while back. Most available copies online were compressed to nearly unwatchable levels, with audio that dropped out during quiet dialogue scenes. The problem was that the original master was difficult to locate digitally. The Australian film archive holds it, but they do not license high-quality digital transfers easily. What ended up working was finding the DVD and ripping it myself with basic software. The result was still modest quality, but at least the audio was stable and the image was legible. If you want to watch this reliably, owning the disc remains the most practical option for now.

Who Should Watch This And Who Should Skip It

This is a reasonable watch if you are interested in Australian cinema from the 1990s or want to see early Toni Collette work before her Hollywood career took off. It is not heavy or demanding. The themes of grief, family communication, and disability are handled with more care than most mainstream Australian films of that era. It will not change your life or leave you thinking deeply about anything for days. People who tend to find slow-burn character dramas tedious will likely struggle with the pacing. The film asks for patience and does not reward viewing at speed or while distracted. If you are looking for a gripping story with strong plot momentum, look elsewhere. This is a dialogue piece with minimal external conflict, and the resolution relies entirely on small personal shifts rather than dramatic events. The runtime of roughly 90 minutes is manageable. There are no content warnings beyond standard themes of death and illness. The language is mild. There is no violence or sexual content that would be concerning. It is a film you can watch with older teenagers without discomfort.

A Few Practical Notes

The stage play version differs from the film in some structural ways. Colleen McGlade wrote the play in 1989, and the screenplay adapts it fairly closely but trims some scenes and rearranges the timeline slightly. If you have access to both, watching the play recording first will give you a clearer sense of how the dialogue translates to screen. The film loses some of the theatrical rawness but gains visual intimacy in key moments. The trade-off is generally fair but not perfectly balanced. I also noticed that the film's distribution was limited outside Australia. Several festivals screened it, and it received a theater release in select cities, but it never had a wide run. That means finding it is genuinely inconvenient in many countries. I spent about twenty minutes across two days just tracking down which service had it in my region last time I checked. Streaming aggregators are unreliable for older Australian titles because licensing windows are short and region-specific. If you find it available where you are, it is worth securing a copy quickly before it disappears again. There is no sequel or related media. The story stands alone. John Wood received an AFI nomination for his performance, and the film was nominated in several categories but did not sweep. It remains a modest entry in the Australian film catalog but one that holds up better than many of its contemporaries in terms of sensitivity and restraint.