For New Zealander comedy collaborators Madeleine Sami and Jackie Van Beek, it all started with an idea, a friendship and one magical ingredient: Celine Dion.

Van Beek was making coffee one morning when she conjured the idea for “The Breaker Upperers,” the duo’s homegrown hit comedy film now on Netflix: Two BFFs run a service helping clients “consciously, forcibly and irreversibly uncouple” from the partners they can’t bring themselves to dump.

“I thought, ‘Who’s the funniest person I know in New Zealand?’ ” said Van Beek last year at the South by Southwest Film Festival, where “The Breaker Upperers” premiered. “And I rang Madeleine.”

The two first met as teenagers at a comedy improv competition when Sami was 14 and Van Beek was 17. Both came up in New Zealand’s comedy and theater scene, appearing in Kiwi crossover film hits “Eagle vs. Shark” and, later, “What We Do in the Shadows” for Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement.

“You kind of become friends with everyone that’s doing work in New Zealand because we’re a country of 4 million,” said the Auckland-raised Sami, perched in the back of the roving RVIP karaoke lounge last March in Austin, Texas. “You become quite tightknit, and you work on each other’s work.”

“And you develop the same sense of humor,” added Van Beek, who hails from Wellington and went to high school with Waititi, who is also an executive producer on “The Breaker Upperers.”

Not long ago, Kiwi talents were encouraged to tone down their Kiwi-ness, Sami and Van Beek say. Now it feels as if the world is eager to embrace their culture.

“Ten years ago, people were saying, ‘Are you going to soften your accent? Maybe you shouldn’t write a character who’s too rural, because international audiences won’t understand them.’ And I think it’s gone completely in the other way now,” said Sami.

Sami and Van Beek are constantly bouncing off one another, in part due to their improv backgrounds and to the chemistry that carries “The Breaker Upperers” — a convention-upending romantic comedy about female friendship, filled with Kiwi comic talents, and packed with ’90s nostalgia that translates regardless of where in the world you grew up.

Van Beek plays the cynical Jen, who channels her bitterness in life and love into running the Breaker Upperers, an agency that helps desperate clients facilitate quick (and often ridiculous) endings to bad relationships. Sami plays the more upbeat Mel, her best friend and partner whose entanglement with a young client drives a wedge into the friendship.

“Mel is a bit of a dreamer and thinks she’s doing this job for the right reasons, trying to help some people; while Jackie’s character is doing it probably because she’s happy to see some unhappy people,” Sami said.

“Jen was burned in love, and she’s hurting and covering up that hurt as human beings do, with anger — and alcohol,” added Van Beek. “It’s very relatable.”

The last decade has seen Kiwi comedy go global, spurred by projects such as HBO’s Emmy-nominated “Flight of the Conchords” from Clement and Bret McKenzie, and films including Waititi’s “Hunt for the Wilderpeople,” which hit U.S. theaters a year before the director made his Marvel blockbuster debut at the helm of “Thor: Ragnarok.”

Now, Sami and Van Beek are poised to become the next New Zealand talents to break out, both onscreen and behind the camera. And they’re doing it while blazing a trail for other women filmmakers in the process.

The collaborators had started co-writing “The Breaker Upperers” when they took the project to producer Carthew Neal and executive producer Waititi at Piki Films. Then Sami and Van Beek, who had written, produced and directed scores of projects between them, decided they would also co-direct. As Sami says, “It was time.”

They hired several female department heads and facilitated job sharing so that working moms were part of a gender-balanced crew, including producers Ainsley Gardiner and Georgina Conder of the female-forward Miss Conception Films.

The duo tapped a cast of comedic talents in supporting roles and cameos, including Clement as a hostile date and Lucy Lawless as a Breaker Upperers client.

Talks with Netflix began shortly after “The Breaker Upperers” debuted at SXSW. It started streaming here Feb. 15.

Critics raved. It screened at the Sydney and London Film Festivals. In its first weekend in release in New Zealand, “The Breaker Upperers” outgrossed 2011 Hollywood rom-com “Bridesmaids,” a locally celebrated achievement, on its way to becoming the highest grossing New Zealand-made film of 2018.

Which brings us to the secret weapon of “The Breaker Upperers.”

No film has worked the power of French Canadian singer Celine Dion into its DNA quite like this one, in which a karaoke rendition of Dion’s “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now” triggers a flashback sequence filmed in the style of those cheesy, low-budget karaoke videos of yesteryear.

It’s a moment so epic that Sami — who does a spot-on Dion impersonation, vocal inflections and all — has been singing the song just about everywhere that the movie has screened in the last year.

Last summer, while the pair were in Australia with the film, they threw a video Hail Mary to their idol, inviting Dion to see “The Breaker Upperers.” Russell Crowe retweeted them, and soon after, Dion’s people called.

They were flown to Melbourne to meet the singer, who had seen the trailer for the film and gave her approval.

“The last thing she said to us was, ‘Keep me in mind for your next film,’ ” said Sami, her face lighting up. “What’s better than having a Celine song in your film? Having a Celine cameo.”