QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM MALTA

Nik Payne is a devoted daddy of three small children: Freja, Ralf and Ulv (Wolfie). He lives with their mother Maria Vatne and her eldest daughter Ronja (from her previous marriage) in a self-sufficient farm somewhere in rural Norway. Nik is English, and the household is fully bilingual. The two adults plant their vegetables, kill their animals and homeschool their children. They are neither anti-capitalistic nor anti-establishment. Maria explains that they broke away from society because they wished to spend all the time with their children, “not just mornings, evenings and weekends”.

These staunch tree-huggers (this is not an ironic accolade: the film literally opens with the parents encouraging one of the children to hug a tree) are not completely isolated. They are far from hermits or eccentric outcasts. Ronja still attends a public school and sees her father regularly. The parents communicate with people through telephone and social media. We learn that the pre-tragedy images were taken from Maria’s Stories. Most crucially they must earn money in order to survive. They spend large sums of cash refurbishing their dream house, and Maria has to sell photographs in order to make ends meet. After the unexpected passing (the precise cause of Maria’s death is never revealed, in a respectful creative decision), they are forced to sell the farm because such income is no longer available. So they move into a much smaller rural house elsewhere.

There is nothing new and wild about A New Kind of Wilderness. There is no useful insight into the advantages and the achievements of self-sufficient living. What is it that the family learnt from the brief experience cut short? Have they made the planet a better place? Have they cut down on consumption and made their society a better place? Have they made the children better people by homeschooling them? In fact, Maria’s confession that they just wanted the children entirely to themselves suggests selfishness instead of altruism. There are no major takeaways, expect that being entirely independent comes at a price: you become very vulnerable (to your mortality). This is a realisation that Maria makes (maybe upon finding out that she was ill? Or perhaps just creepy foreboding? Because the nature of her death is never revealed, we’ll never know).

The problems that Nik and the children have to face are very first-world. They downgrade to a noticeably small house, however still bigger than the vast majority of people’s on this planet. The second half of this 84-minute documentary consists of the children getting used to their new life, and Nik having to decide whether to move back to the UK with his three children, or staying in Norway where they can grow close to their half-sister Ronja. The interactions are warm and tender, the intimacy is moving, and Nik is an adorable father. But that’s about it.

The family eventually learn how to manage grief and carry on with life, just like any family that has prematurely lost one of the parents has to do. There is no life-changing revelation and epiphany, except perhaps that money is more important than they anticipated. Little Wolfie says: “we’ll get a lot of money for the house”. A vaguely perplexed Nik isn’t able to confront his pragmatic observation, and instead just confirms it. Neither shocking nor sobering. A repetitive music score and a tune as cheesy as the tree-hugging help to seal the pseudo-reflective label upon this lame family entertainment product.

Good cinema should seek the extraordinary, or at least to turn an ordinary story into something extraordinary and/or universal. A New Kind of Wilderness does neither.

A New Kind of Wilderness shows in the Mare Nostrum section the the 2nd Mediterrane Film Festival, in Malta. The movie premiered in Sundance, and it has since won multiple prizes in. various festivals.