Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016)
New Zealand cinema has always punched well above its weight, and Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016) is one of the cleaner examples of why. Adapted by writer-director Taika Waititi from Barry Crump's 1986 novel Wild Pork and Watercress, the film is a collaboration between the small New Zealand outfits Defender Films, Piki Films and Curious Films, made on a modest budget by any Hollywood measure, and it went on to become the highest-grossing New Zealand film in the country's domestic box office history at the time of its release. That is not a trivial achievement for a 101-minute comedy-drama about a stroppy city kid and a grumpy old farmer hiding out in the bush. It is the kind of result that tells you a film connected with an audience rather than simply being marketed at one.
Waititi had already made a name for himself internationally with the mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows (co-directed with Jemaine Clement), and Wilderpeople arrived at a moment when the industry was watching him closely. He would follow it almost immediately with Thor: Ragnarok, his entry into the Marvel machine, but this film feels like the more personal work of the two: a story rooted in specifically New Zealand landscape, culture and sensibility, shot on location in the Waitakere Ranges and the Urewera forests, and allowed to breathe in ways that franchise filmmaking rarely permits. The premise is economical and a little absurd, which is entirely the point. A reluctant odd couple, a wilderness, and a comically overblown national manhunt. On paper it sounds thin. On screen it is something else.
The cast is the engine of the thing. Sam Neill brings a weathered, laconic quality to Hec that is well-suited to a man who has spent years preferring trees to people. Julian Dennison, then a teenager making only his second feature appearance, is given a role that could easily have tipped into cutesy caricature and instead makes Ricky feel like a real, complicated, quietly wounded kid. Rima Te Wiata, as foster mother Bella, has the least screen time of the three leads and arguably the largest emotional footprint. Rachel House plays the child-services officer with a committed comedic ferocity that earns every laugh, and Tioreore Ngatai-Melbourne rounds out the supporting ensemble with a nicely offbeat energy.
Cinematographer Lachlan Milne frames the New Zealand bush as a place of genuine scale and strange beauty: wide, green, occasionally vertiginous, the kind of landscape that makes human beings look appropriately small and a little ridiculous. There is a warmth to the colour palette that keeps the film from feeling like a nature documentary, and Milne uses the terrain as a character rather than a backdrop. The score, composed by Lukasz Pawel Buda and Samuel Scott, mixes folk-inflected acoustic textures with something slightly weirder and more offbeat, matching the film's own tonal shifts between tender domesticity and deadpan adventure. Editors Tom Eagles and Yana Gorskaya keep the rhythm of the piece light on its feet, handling the tonal gear-changes, of which there are several, with enough dexterity that you rarely feel the join. I also reviewed Next Goal Wins, another Waititi film with a similarly warm, slightly shambolic spirit, which makes for an interesting companion piece. For another New Zealand family story with an unexpected emotional punch, see also Scrapper, though that one is set considerably further from any bush.
I run distinctly hot and cold on Taika Waititi. What We Do in the Shadows and Thor: Ragnarok both left me cold, while Next Goal Wins won me over, and Hunt for the Wilderpeople lands firmly, happily, in the win column.
When he is on song, the thing he does best is character, and this is Waititi at his warmest and most human. Sam Neill, Julian Dennison and Rima Te Wiata hold the whole film together, and young Dennison in particular is fantastic.
Dennison plays Ricky, a defiant, guarded kid who has been shunted from one foster home to the next, forever braced for the next rejection and filling the gap with a devotion to gangster rap and a habit of calling Tupac his best mate. He washes up in the middle of the New Zealand bush with Bella and Hec, whom he takes to calling Auntie and Uncle, and Bella is the heart of the thing: warm, funny, endlessly patient, showing a boy who has learned to keep his guard permanently up that he does not always have to. She is the sort who takes in strays and shows them how to love themselves, and she is wonderful.
Then tragedy strikes the little household, and the film pivots on a sixpence into something else entirely: a ramshackle wilderness adventure. Ricky and Hec, who cannot abide one another, end up alone and adrift in the bush, an injury stranding them out there for weeks, while the outside world, and one gloriously dogged child-services officer, spins it all into a lurid tale of a grieving man who has abducted a boy. The further the two of them go, the stranger it gets, taking in hunters, bounty hunters and one memorably unhinged bushman.
It should not hold together, this lurch from tender foster-family drama to deadpan runaway caper, and yet it absolutely does. It is very funny, it is unexpectedly moving when it wants to be, it is beautifully played, and it tells its odd, shaggy story with warmth and control. Four stars, and comfortably my favourite Waititi so far. On this evidence, he should make more like this and fewer of the other sort.
Hunt for the Wilderpeople is the sort of film that arrives without enormous fanfare and then quietly refuses to leave your head. It works as a comedy, as a coming-of-age story, and as a gentle piece of character writing about people who do not know how to ask for the things they need, which is perhaps the oldest subject in cinema. Its specific New Zealand flavour, the landscape, the vernacular, the wry relationship with authority, gives it a texture that makes it feel genuinely unlike most of what comes out of English-language filmmaking at any given moment. Films this unpretentious are harder to make than they look.
Rating: ★★★★ | Year: 2016 | Watched: 2026-09-28
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016) on YouTube
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