dir. by Taika Waititi
Fresh off of his acclaimed 2015 feature What We Do in the Shadows, New Zealand director Taika Waititi premiered his latest film, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, at this year's Sundance Film Festival. Boasting a well-deserved 8.4 on IMDb, this latest film is equal parts hilarious, adventurous, and deceptively deep, its delightful characters and fantastic script building up to one of the best films of the year.
Ricky (Julian Dennison) is a child under the care of New Zealand's child welfare services with a history of troublemaking. When placed into the care of Bella (Rima Te Wiata) and Hec (Sam Niell), he finally starts to feel at home, until Bella passes away and child services decides to take Ricky away from his new home. Fearing this, Ricky escapes into the bush, where he is joined by Hec, eventually causing a national manhunt due to their disappearance.
On the surface, Hunt for the Wilderpeople is a funny and exciting adventure-comedy, populated by almost universally delightful characters, Ricky and Hec being the best of them all. The script is full of great interactions, and both lead characters are memorable and lovable. As an adventure, the film succeeds in part due to an abundance of scenery porn, showing off the gorgeous scenery of the New Zealand bush as the protagonists amble from one encounter to the next. The film starts to drag a little in its second half, particularly with one extraneous sequence surrounding a character named Psycho Sam, but still retains plenty of laughs, and for its climax bursts into a highly exciting action scene complete with lined up cars a la Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior.
Beneath, however, both of the protagonists have greater depths, especially Hec, who has an ever-increasing undercurrent of melancholy as he comes to lose everything important to him over the course of the film. Early on, after Bella's death, he wishes to set out into the bush, because it's all he really knows. Meanwhile, while Ricky starts out wanting to escape from child services, he starts the movie with few survival skills and starts complaining as soon as Hec finds him. Over time, though, the two's attitudes to their escape reverse as it becomes clearer that the police - and society in general - will never stop chasing them.
Ricky's own backstory relates more to the child welfare system having failed him, shuffling him from place to place without letting them find a home. Both he and Hec feel like outcasts to society, but while Ricky idealizes life as outlaws, the film doesn't entirely glorify that view, instead providing a more complex perspective. The ending solidifies the film's slant in favour of society, but doesn't quite link back to earlier ideas to make the film's themes as strong as they might have been. However, this doesn't detract from the strong groundwork supplied by the characters.
Of course, above all of that, Hunt for the Wilderpeople is simply a lot of fun. This isn't the sort of festival comedy which uses a more divisive style of humour to drive home a deeper point, but a film with wide appeal on top of its ideas. Filled with memorable scenes and characters but also boasting a level of poignancy often not seen in comedies, it's a film which deserves a wider release than it has gotten. In a year which has been filled with middling blockbuster tentpoles and which has had a general shortage of high-profile must-see indies, Wilderpeople is a hidden gem, something which more people need to know about and more people need the ability to see. If this film doesn't get a strong following on video, then that will be a real shame.
9/10
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