Carrot-topped defence lawyer Diana Ferraro (McClements) is assigned to the case of the equally ginger Lucy (Karvan), a juvenile delinquent who has vandalised a police car. An escapee from a detention centre, Lucy has witnessed the murder of a corrupt lawyer with whom she was having a bizarre affair, and is trying to get back into custody to avoid the mystery killer.
Nervous about handling her first case and uneasy because the dead man was her boss, Diana is initially sceptical of Lucy's conspiracy ravings. Gradually, though, the lawyer comes to believe the girl's crazy stories, especially when the killers try to rub Lucy out. The paranoid urchin likewise comes to trust the older woman, leading her to expose a particularly nasty racket involving abused kids, and to catch the murderer.
This Australian near-miss combines gritty soap operatics and criminal conspiracy, but is mainly a character study of the contrasting redheads. The leads are both interestingly unusual, playing off the actresses' physical similarities as much as the characters' variant backgrounds. Karvan is especially fine as the vulnerable but streetwise kid who already knows how rotten the system is, and is proved right by a plot which exposes sexual and financial irregularities throughout most of the Australian juvenile justice system.