CinemaNerdz

Movie Review: Hunt for the Wilderpeople

Dina Paulson-McEwen

Hunt for the Wilderpeople is an uplifting, gruff New Zealander film about family love. Ricky (Julian Dennison) comes from foster care to the home of Hec (Sam Neill) and his wife, Bella (Rima Te Wiata). Hec and Ricky stay away from each other initially, largely due to how similar they are. Both prefer nature and solitude to city life and small talk, and so they vet each other cautiously. Ricky tries to befriend Hec because he lacks an adult male figure who might care for him and seems Hunt for the Wilderpeople Posterinteresting, while Hec does not want to be responsible for Ricky’s well-being nor how he occupies himself on their farm; this is all Bella’s job.

Hec is heart-jerking at times, suppressing his emotional undercurrent, and a combination of Jeff Bridges’ begrudging hero in True Grit (2010) and Jack Nicholson’s hidden softie in As Good As It Gets (1997). He hides his vulnerabilities beneath a mean exterior and tells Ricky what he wants most is to be left alone. As the film continues, he reveals a quiet passion and devotion to his wife. Scenes of his sketching Bella and the three of them are wonderful bites of hope, giving rushes of love to a film that experiences tragedy we do not see in its trailer. The story moves from a space of weird family dynamic to two guys discovering companionship and eventually forming a bond that is the basis of family.

The two of them become “the wilderpeople” when they flee the farm and grow so used to staying in the woods that they decide to make it a temporary home. They know they are “running,” which is the film’s way of saying that Ricky and Hec are learning about their true selves as they try to outrun others and connect through tough love. Ricky’s haikus, suggested as therapy, are a nice fine art balance to the nature-heaviness of the film. Although the haikus are about inflicting pain upon others, as with most things Ricky does, he is always a second away from a smile or doing something nice for someone. Hunt for the Wilderpeople does not concentrate on the pain Ricky has experienced as an abandoned child, which makes his acting out and sweetness more real. Hec has the same capacity to turn ugliness into something kind, and they slowly learn to trust that their generosity with each other can be both held and reciprocated.

Director Taika Waititi shows us beautiful shots of the New Zealand forest, most reminiscent in A-list movies as the bedding for Lord of the Rings. Thick, green, and seemingly endless, it seems like the perfect place for them to be lost and find themselves, regardless of the violence around. Indeed, Waititi has made an uplifting film tuned by a lively, modern soundtrack; although legal dangers await both of them in various forms, Hec and Ricky show they have a resilience not only for surviving the outdoors, but for keeping their spirits high. It is this commonality that brings them together in scenes that brought on surprising tears in a film I thought would be entirely too silly from the trailer. Instead, I left imbued with the spirit of a little boy and a craggy old man and of the simple sense that family, left untouched, can be its own kind of perfect.

Dina Paulson-McEwen

Dina Paulson-McEwen is the author of Parts of love (Finishing Line Press, 2018), a 2017 finalist in the Finishing Line Press New Women’s Voices Chapbook Competition. Her work appears in Flash Fiction Magazine, FlashFlood, Minola Review, Dying Dahlia Review, The Ham Free Press, The Hungry Chimera, and elsewhere and has been exhibited at Hudson Guild Gallery and San Juan Capistrano Library. Dina is the assistant managing editor at Compose | A Journal of Simply Good Writing and an editor at Flash Fiction Magazine. She works with creative thinkers through her company, Aqua Editing. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
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