With a voice that requires no megaphone and a commanding presence – especially when she’s playing welfare officers hunting Wilderpeople – actor Rachel House would seem well equipped to direct films. The Mountain is the actor’s first feature where she’s in charge. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given her past drama coaching experience with youngsters and her omnipresence in Taika Waititi’s films, it’s a kid-led movie. One that could exist in the same universe as Boy and Hunt for the Wilderpeople. A kind of younger, milder, safer, sadder cousin.
Though, sorry to say, it’s not quite in the same league. Even with its sweet, affecting ending, it’s an uneven film with not enough story and one aimed chiefly at kids, even if it is taking on some serious stuff, like whakapapa, absent parents and cancer.
The first of those has personal resonance for House. She grew up with her adoptive Scottish migrant parents in Whangārei, and has birth ties including the Taranaki iwi of Ngāti Mutunga and Te Āti Awa. Which explains why The Mountain peak is Taranaki Maunga, complete with occasional Wētā FX-rendered mist.
House co-wrote the screenplay about three runaway tweens – one of them with cancer who has run away from hospital – heading up its slopes. The ill Sam (Elizabeth Atkinson) is the daughter of single Pākehā mum (Fern Sutherland), who believes, because her long-gone father was Māori, her ancestor mountain will cure her.
She meets and recruits two other loner kids with parental challenges, Mallory, and Bronco (fellow acting newbies Reuben Francis and Terence Daniel) to her mission. Up, eventually, they go.
Comedian-writer Tom Furniss had brought a story inspired by a past childhood adventure with a sick friend to Piki Films, Waititi’s NZ production company. House put her stamp on it and took on the directing gig.
The result makes The Mountain, after last year’s Uproar, two local films in a row that have started out as tales by Pākehā writers which have become whakapapa-odyssey stories with a Māori writer-director adding their viewpoint. And another story, after Wilderpeople, about quirky kids going bush.
Uproar, about an outsider Māori kid in a white private Dunedin school during the 1981 Springbok tour, was okay but didn’t quite hit home with the main character’s story. The Mountain suffers the same problem. It might hit an emotional home run in its closing stages but there are too many patches in its 90 minutes where the trio’s exuberance is the only thing going for it and the storytelling is spinning its wheels. So does Bronco, who insists on pushing his BMX up the mountain.
Yes, they have parents in pursuit – Sutherland as Sam’s understandably harried mum and Byron Coll and Troy Kingi as the boys’ dads – one widowed, and one divorced and sharing custody. There’s a reason they don’t call the police – Kingi’s character is the new cop in town and calling out search and rescue on his first week wouldn’t be a good look.
Among the kids, Mallory is there to be a Samwise Gamgee to two Frodos; Bronco is our te ao Māori tour guide and environmental consultant (he’s a little overwritten) and Sam is the brave single-minded, imagination-got-the-better-of-her kid with cancer who won’t listen and whose new mates figure they had better tag along to look after her as much as share in her adventure.
Watching the three’s friendship flourish is the film’s chief joy, which makes up for the occasionally patchy acting. It also makes it an easy movie to like. It’s sure to win a big local following and it makes a valiant attempt at juggling comedy with something more serious. But The Mountain still lacks the story power to make it as memorable as its older cousins.
Rating out of 5: ★★★
The Mountain, directed by Rachel House, is in cinemas from March 28.
