Something to watch tonight: Wednesday 14 August

Existence (Bergh, 2012)

I men­tioned this in passing the oth­er day (in the Magic Mike recom­mend­a­tion on 1 August) and now that I have con­firmed its avail­ab­il­ity I can bring it to you here.

Back in the early 2010s, the New Zealand Film Commission had a pro­gramme to make a series of low budget films (around $250k) called Escalator and Existence was one of the films that actu­ally got com­pleted and screened.

Other Escalator films that made a splash included Sophie Henderson’s Fantail and anoth­er pre­vi­ous recom­mend­a­tion here, Housebound (Gerard Johnstone).

In a bleak and windswept envir­on­ment, high in the hills sur­roun­ded by for­bid­ding wind tur­bines, a ragged band of out­casts work tire­lessy togeth­er to make some­thing out of almost noth­ing. They are resource­ful and determ­ined – bat­tling extreme con­di­tions and over­com­ing impossible odds. I’m talk­ing about the char­ac­ters in new Wellington fea­ture film Existence which gets its première in Wellington on Friday night, but I might as well be describ­ing the film­makers them­selves who shot the film in the hills around Belmont and Makara in 2011. Existence is the first product of the NZ Film Commission’s low budget Escalator pro­gramme and is a test­a­ment to the depth of tal­ent in the industry here.

Refer a friend

Set in a future where envir­on­ment­al dis­aster has doomed the remain­ing pop­u­la­tion to live off scraps – and where a fence guarded by mys­ter­i­ous “riders” prom­ises a bet­ter future on the oth­er side – Existence focuses on one woman (played by Loren Taylor from Eagle vs. Shark) and the sac­ri­fice that she is pre­pared to make for a bet­ter life for her fam­ily. Existence is an art­house movie in genre cloth­ing. Writer-director Juliet Bergh has her cast under­play­ing when they could have chosen to chew scenery – and the film is the bet­ter for it. Matthew Sunderland – as one of the riders – is par­tic­u­larly effect­ive, the still­ness of his per­form­ance allow­ing the audi­ence to read so much into the crags and lines in his face.

I should prob­ably acknow­ledge a tiny con­flict. I am a friend of the co-producer of the film, Melissa Dodds, and back in the day put togeth­er the web­site for the film, existence.co.nz.

In fact, I still host it so if you click that link, you’ll be get­ting a twelve-year-old web­site sent to you from the loft of my house in Silverstream. As is the ori­gin­al Funerals & Snakes web­site, where this review is archived.

Where to watch Existence

Aotearoa: Streaming on Prime Video or digit­al rent­al from NZ Film On Demand (the NZ Film Commission)

Australia, Canada, Ireland, UK: Digital rent­al from Apple

USA: Streaming on Roku (free with ads) or Reveel (a free stream­er that is new to me but says it is avail­able worldwide)