by Nigel Hicks
Recently completing photography in Western Melbourne, Lucky is a horror film written and directed by Anezka Sero. It’s the first film for Lakestone Productions, with plans for a follow-up, Witch in the Woods! already in the works.
Lucky features prominent outdoor scenes filmed at Newport Lakes, with other locations in Keilor featured throughout. Newport has history of being used as a filming location, with Ghost Rider, Where the Wild Things Are, and series Shantaram all making use of either the railway workshops or the scenic bushland. “Western Melbourne is so rich with natural wildlife which many people don’t realise,” says Sero.
The film is centred on 15-year-old Lukas (Sebastian Sero, son of, and also winner of the 2026 AACTA Young Stars: National Youth Casting Call), a budding but troubled young filmmaker, who finds an old coin in bushland where he often hangs out after school. The coin initially seems to change Lukas’ fortunes, but things start unravelling when he starts seeing a strange homeless man who appears to follow him.
Lucky delves into family dynamics and dysfunction, with not only the mother’s bipolar disorder, but also the father largely absent.
Sero, who has a writing PhD with a focus on Folklore, Fairytale and Narratology, wrote the screenplay after listening to her sons discussing urban legends on a bushwalk and realising that there was great potential there. She is drawn to character and location driven stories, with psychological or folklore elements, which we discovered when we recently interviewed her about the film.
What was your writing process for Lucky?
“I’ve been writing screenplays and novels for quite some time. I have a fairly standard process of working for half of the day, then going for a walk with my two sons [both of whom appear in Lucky] where I’ll often chat about whatever story I’m working on and they’ll give me notes. My eldest son Sebastian, who plays Lukas, is actually studying writing and film via Open Uni this year, via early homeschool entry. Luka also loves urban myths and fairy-tales, and often tells us stories as we walk too, though he’s more receptive to notes from his mother and not his brother, ha!
“The story behind Lucky came about on one of our walks at the lake we often go to, which is just down the road from us. It is the location we ended up using not just for Lucky but as the logo for Lakestone Productions!
“A lot of our dialogue between the Lukas and Sam characters in Lucky are lifted straight off conversations I’ve heard the boys have. The coin Lukas finds in the film, Luka has been telling me for months would make a great location for an It type Entity seduction point (instead of the red balloon near the street grate, it’s a coin that appears in the pool). So that idea and coin location came from Luka!
“I’ve had the idea of writing a Welcome to Derry type story that’s based on a featured family coming back together, for a while now, but the actual reason I wrote this one now was – funnily enough – off the back of a big A24 horror film Sebastian was recently in callbacks for. He was down to two or three for the role but was ultimately too tall for it. He was devastated at the time, as much as he understands the casting process, and said to me, ‘it’s not necessarily this film I wanted to make but it’s the fact I was so close to A24 and I’m just so drawn to horror roles – I wish we could just make one ourselves’ and then I just looked at him and we both said at the same time, ‘Well, why don’t we?’”
Filming in the western suburbs in Melbourne, did it match your initial story ideas?
“Absolutely! The Newport Lakes that we’ve informally dubbed ‘the Lakestones’, was such a vital part of our story and so close to our actual home, so it all just organically came together. Most of our best developmental chats happened as we strolled through the lake and bush paths which would go on to become most of our exterior locations – the interiors were all shot at a house in Keilor.
“Western Melbourne is also such a working class, melting pot meeting point of so many cultures and locations and is so rich with natural wildlife which many people don’t realise! Our lakes, bush walks and paths rival that of the Eastern Suburbs, without the prestige and price tag of course! – and that’s certainly the world that I’ve come from. I’m the child of immigrants and have lived in melting pots my entire life with access to the beach and the bush and if it wasn’t for that, I probably wouldn’t be as fascinated with location and sprawling, teen based, unstructured dialogue as I am.”
Was it challenging as a parent to take on the commitment it must have been to bring this film into reality?
“It honestly wasn’t all that challenging or dissimilar to our usual lives! Both my sons travel a few times a year for work – sometimes interstate and sometimes internationally – and both boys are homeschooled, so we are fairly used to working for 3-6 months at home, then we pack up and go when one of us gets a job.
“Bringing a film together past screenplay stage certainly took more time, and mental and financial resources than anything I’ve ever done before. There were many long days where I had to learn to navigate the world of child work and location permits, location releases, creative agreements and all the other aspects that come with producing that I’d been familiar with but have never enacted myself. But I got through it all and learnt an infinite amount during the process that will help me streamline the process for Witch in the Woods! and future projects. I was fortunate too to have Jayson Sutcliffe, who was my AD and Lynn Robb, who has a background in marketing and law, to assist me with that side of production, and who I’m enterally grateful for! All the council and government bodies I worked with were extraordinarily helpful and supportive of my ambition to engage as many teen actors as I could and to work in local places and I feel so much more confident and equipped now going into our next film and hopefully many more to come in the future!”
You’ve indicated a lesser-known truth about casting, in that roles for 12-17 year olds are become rarer. Do you think that hiring authentic teenagers may catch on?
“I really hope so! I’m fortunate to have worked with many teen actors in Australia as a dialect and acting coach. Shaping scenes with new, emerging actors is some of the most rewarding work you can do because they approach the material in such a raw and authentic way and can give reads that are so convincing because they sound like real teens. It’s an incredible experience watching your story come to life in front of you when it’s being workshopped in a casting environment.
“When you audition and cast, often the hardest part of it all is the casting itself. You’re often presented with so many interesting and arresting options to your character and it can be genuinely difficult to know which way to go when you’ve got 2-3 super solid options. Doing chemistry reads with other actors is the only way sometimes to refine this as it’s usually instantly obvious as to where the screen chemistry is going between the top selects. I often get my best directing impulses just by watching actors work in the final stages of casting and know exactly which actor will work best with a script, and which ones would be more suited for a more unstructured, improv-based approach. I’m honestly so fortunate to have worked with the amount of teen actors I have, both as a coach and as a director and I hope to cast many more of them in the future.”
You mentioned Babadook as a genre inspiration in an interview recently. Did any films visually inspire you for the look of Lucky?
“Hereditary, Heretic and Obsession are some of my biggest inspirations for lighting and framing interior interpersonal, dramatic scenes well – all three do an excellent job contrasting cooler exterior and more action-based scenes with warmer, more saturated interior tones that preserve and highlight the intimacy of what’s going on in the characters’ homes and internal worlds. The best narrative tension and acting in Hereditary, for example, is in the dinner scene where the family is grappling with the loss of their daughter and the son seems quite hostile and then Toni Collette’s character just explodes, releasing the tension the entire family has been bottling up for the past few sequences. It’s just so cathartic and beautifully executed across all boards which I’m sure many filmmakers and audiences would agree with!
“I really like how the Philippou brothers shoot their more character driven scenes too, like the intro and party scenes in Talk to Me. They work so well with continuous shots – framing actions and conversations that are already in motion and you really feel like you’re a guest in these scenes, so when the horror hits or an important character moment, it’s so much more impactful.
“Bring Her Back, the Philippou brothers’ second film, actually inspired some of our shot choices in the scenes in Lucky where Neal, the boys’ father, tries to confront what’s going on in Lukas’s world. Undertow was an inspiration in the framing of some of our Entity based interior scenes in how we let the camera linger in the spaces and shadows without always revealing our Entity. Leviticus definitely inspired some of our colour choices for our bush exteriors and we looked at Blair Witch too a bit for our found footage sequences which I hope to expand upon in the Witch in the Woods!”
Do you foresee there will be more horror films for Lakestone Productions after Witch in the Woods!?
“Yes, absolutely. I’d like to look at partnering with VicScreen and Screen Australia for our next film and an Australian based production company like Causeway Films who have produced the majority of the drama based horror films that inspired Lucky. I’m also really drawn to character and location driven stories and stories with psychological and folklore elements to it – films like Hokum and Heretic for example, which was a big inspiration in the writing of Witch in the Woods! – so I’d like to write a few more along those lines as there’s just so much material to tap into once you start working with folklore and location.
“There are just hundreds of tales out there that can be tapped into, working adjacent to quieter stories, happening within the characters’ worlds or just outside of them, which is where the best horror lies, I think. I’m also a big fan of Mike Flanagan’s work – the Haunting of Bly Manor in particular which is so driven by family trauma, memory and location. Liminal and negative space is also a big interest of mine which you see in films like Backrooms, Don’t Worry Darling and Vivarium – I can foresee myself wanting to direct, write and produce something along those lines once I’ve got some more money or studio involvement together as you’d obviously need access to much bigger budgets to really visually represent those spaces and stories in a convincing way and in a larger visual scope!”
All going to plan, Lucky will release in 2027
