The Dead Lands (2014)

Directed by: Toa Fraser

Two Maori tribes meet at the site of an ancient battle, ostensibly to allow the visiting tribe to honour the remains of their dead ancestors, and thus pave the way to peace between the clans. But the leader of the visitors, Wirepa (Te Kohe Tuhaka), desecrates the bones (in a scene of scatalogical graphicness that prefigures the gore to come) and blames his host’s son, Hongi (James Rolleston), for the insult.

Wipera and his band slaughter most of their enemies, leaving Hongi as the only living male of near adult age. Though not yet a warrior, he sets of in pursuit of Wipera, with little expectation that he will return. But the chase leads them all into the Dead Lands, where rumours abound of a monster who killed an entire tribe…

Death, and dead ancestors, pervade this intense movie from New Zealand. Dying is bloody and protracted, yet rarely feared by those to whom it comes – what matters is the purpose for which combat is started, and the manner in which death is met.

The major exception to this is the monster-warrior (Lawrence Makoare), a wild and savage killer. He fears death because that will expose him to the judgement of his ancestors, who will not forgive him for slaughtering his own tribe. So he kills all who cross his path, to stave off his own death and the moment of judgement, and lives instead in a permanently shadowed, earthly purgatory.

Whether he initially sees a chance for redemption in the arrival of Hongi is not clear, but he helps to develop the young warrior, and together they hunt Wipera and his men.

Director Toa Fraser must be sick of comparisons between this film and Mel Gibson’s 2006 Apocalypto, but there are clear similarities, though the plot is arguably inverted for much of the movie – in The Dead Lands, the one pursues the many.

Fraser pulls off an impressive feat in showing beauty alongside the bloody violence without either glorifying it or becoming censoriously judgemental – only at the very end does the plot take a counter-cultural twist, but it feels rational rather than inconsistent.

If I have any gripes, they are that the depictions of Hongi’s encounters with his dead grandmother are a little under-realised (bordering on the unintentionally comic); and that there are too many close-ups and low-angle shots, limiting our perspective and making it hard to get a sense of place.

But overall this is a fine, uncompromising and impressive film.