Hunt for the Wilderpeople

Before his death in 1996, Bar­ry Crump had writ­ten 24 semi-auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal com­ic nov­els drawn from a life spent chiefly in the New Zealand bush. Now, Tai­ka Wait­i­ti, the direc­tor of 2007’s Eagle Vs Shark and 2010’s Boy, has adapt­ed one of those nov­els, ​‘Wild Pork and Water­cress’, for the big screen. The results are a charm­ing merg­er of the lit­er­ary and the cinematic.

Hunt for the Wilder­peo­ple tells the sto­ry of 10-year-old Maori orphan Ricky Bak­er (Julian Den­ni­son) who, fol­low­ing the sud­den death of his lov­ing Aun­tie Bel­la Faulkn­er (Rima Te Wia­ta), goes on the run with his Uncle Hec (Sam Neill), a gruff, grumpy bush­man now sus­pect­ed of abduc­tion and per­ver­sion. This episod­ic, picaresque tale is for­mal­ly divid­ed, like Crump’s nov­el, into 11 num­bered and head­ed chap­ters. With­in this decid­ed­ly book­ish frame, books and read­ing play a key part. Hec’s illit­er­a­cy and dis­dain for even the spo­ken word are off­set by Ricky’s love of books and his chat­ter­box tendencies.

The film’s title derives from an arti­cle on Wilde­beest that Ricky perus­es in a hut where the two fugi­tives briefly stop. At night, by the camp­fire, Ricky reads books aloud to Hec, grad­u­al­ly teach­ing him to love writ­ten sto­ries. Hec then teach­es Ricky ​“the knack” of bush sur­vival and self-suf­fi­cien­cy. It is a decid­ed­ly lit­er­ary landscape.

Yet from the open­ing aer­i­al spec­ta­cle of the North Island’s vast forest­ed moun­tains, Hunt for the Wilder­peo­ple is also high­ly cin­e­mat­ic. Not only does it race through a vari­ety of recog­nis­able screen gen­res (Boy’s Own adven­ture, bud­dy movie, com­ing-of-age, the west­ern, police chase flick), but there are also explic­it post-Crumpian allu­sions to such diverse films as Croc­o­dile Dundee, Psy­cho, Ram­bo, Trans­form­ers, The Ter­mi­na­tor, Scar­face and Lord of the Rings – with only the lat­ter hav­ing any obvi­ous New Zealand connections.

Ricky fan­cies him­self a hip-hop gangs­ta (and names his pet dog Tupac), while social work­er Paula (Rachel House) insis­tent­ly and absurd­ly appro­pri­ates the tough-guy man­ner­isms of Hollywood’s cops and even Marines. Yet while these char­ac­ters seek to define them­selves by all-Amer­i­can mod­els, their quest for iden­ti­ty – a stock theme in rite of pas­sage sto­ries – will take them deep into the hin­ter­lands of Te Ure­w­era. From this there will emerge a film as unique­ly indige­nous as the sup­pos­ed­ly extinct huia bird that Ricky and Hec redis­cov­er in a ​“majes­ti­cal” spot.

Hunt for the Wilder­peo­ple is a fun, fun­ny fam­i­ly yarn. Wait­i­ti him­self cameos as a local church min­is­ter preach­ing the ​‘tricky’ ways of Jesus, while Rhys Dar­by, after steal­ing the show as deputy cul­tur­al attaché́/band man­ag­er Mur­ray Hewitt in TV’s Flight of the Con­chords, and as were­wolf ​‘alpha dog’ Anton in Waititi’s own What We Do in the Shad­ows, does it again here as lon­er con­spir­a­cy the­o­rist ​‘Psy­cho’ Sam. There may be an inevitabil­i­ty to the way in which Hec and Ricky, for all their dif­fer­ences and dys­func­tion, even­tu­al­ly grow togeth­er, but a rich seam of sub­ver­sive humour stops the sen­ti­ment becom­ing too treacly.