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Heartbreakingly good and filled with a desperate intensity, ''Angel Baby'' offers a breakthrough role to John Lynch, the Irish actor more familiar for his character roles. Not since ''Cal'' has the tender, mournful Mr. Lynch had a comparable chance to shine. As written and directed with great depth of feeling by Michael Rymer, this wild, doomy love story casts Mr. Lynch and Jacqueline McKenzie as two mentally fragile people caught up in a whirlwind courtship that is as perilous as it is intoxicating. The film won a number of well-deserved awards in Australia in 1995.
''Angel Baby'' first introduces Harry (Mr. Lynch), who is doing his tentative best to live a quiet life with the family of his brother (Colin Friels). Harry relies on medication and group therapy to keep him calm, but the effect of meeting Kate (Ms. McKenzie) at the clinic throws him utterly off balance. Waifish, raccoon-eyed Kate is a free spirit with an even more troubled history than Harry's. But it's not her difficulties that draw Harry to her, not even when the two compare slash marks on their wrists.
Instead, this film captures their intense physical intimacy as Harry and Kate fall raptly in love. The two actors intertwine in ways that are deep, erotic and a shade panic-stricken, as if they were clinging for dear life. They are.
A few danger signs along the way, like the fact that Kate thinks she is receiving secret messages from a ''Wheel of Fortune''-like television show, or some uncertain stabs at lightheartedness with the film's supporting players, bring ''Angel Baby'' dangerously close to a cute and patronizing view of its characters' illness. But these performances are too believable and wrenching to allow any trivializing of the story.
Hoping sweetly and blindly that they can live happily ever after, Harry and Kate go through all the motions of setting up a conventional life, as when he brings her to dinner with his brother's family. It does not go unremarked that Kate is beautiful but can't use silverware.
The stakes rise when, after the couple idyllically set up housekeeping in colorfully escapist style, Kate becomes pregnant. At the very least, there are chemical worries: if she wants the baby she must stop taking her medication, and the hormonal effects of pregnancy may have devastating effects. Still the lovers decide they are destined to have this baby, even if it means taking a wild leap into the unknown. The whole film is about taking such chances and romantically seizing love at the expense of safety. ''I wanted to make the kind of movie that if I would have seen at 18 would have changed my life,'' Mr. Rymer has written.
Mr. Lynch does a beautiful job of conveying Harry's mad love and terrible confusion. He is seen yearning to love and protect Kate while also sensing, with quiet anguish, that the task is beyond his means. Ms. McKenzie, who previously appeared in ''Romper Stomper,'' plays the freer spirit with scary, captivating abandon, making it easy to understand why Harry would do anything for her. The two performances are perfectly balanced. They keep the characters brave and touching right to the end.
