28 Years later, Kōkā, Elio and Merchant Ivory are in cinemas.
This weekend Aotearoa New Zealand celebrated the Matariki holiday. On one level it is the “Māori New Year”, the arrival of the Matariki (or Pleiades) star cluster in the night sky marking mid-winter. But on another level it’s also a time of year to remember those who have departed this dimension and call their names so that they may move on to the next. A memento mori, if you will.
Now, I’m pretty sure that the global roll-out of 28 Years Later, Danny Boyle’s new instalment in the 28 … Later franchise, wasn’t specifically timed to coincide with Matariki here but its themes are spookily appropriate – it’s most moving scene explicitly references memento mori and the necessity of memorialising those that have fallen by the wayside, even if you don’t know their names1.
In 28 Days Later (2002), Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland conjured up a classic horror founded on modern fears of mutating viruses – the “Rage Virus” turns its victims into zombie-like creatures with an insatiable desire to consume human flesh and an impressive ability to sprint. In the sequel, 28 Weeks Later (2007), authorities are trying to contain the virus to the UK mainland without success but in the new picture evidently a successful quarantine has been achieved. The rest of the world is happily going about its business but Britain has been sacrificed.
On Lindisfarne, a small island off the coast of Northumberland, a small group of survivors are protected from the marauding infected because the causeway that connects them to the mainland only appears briefly at low tide. Brave scouts occasionally head across to forage but are told that if they don’t return, there’s no possibility of rescue.
One of these foragers, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) has decided that his 12-year-old son Spike (Alfie Williams) is ready to join an expedition and use his bow and arrow skills to secure his first “kill”. Spike’s mother Isla (Jodie Comer) is sick in bed and we don’t know whether she is suffering from PTSD or something more physical. When Spike hears a tale that there might be a surviving doctor on the mainland, he takes the fateful decision to escape from the island with Isla and go and find him.
Each of the three acts of Garland’s screenplay have quite different tones. Act One sets the scene, reminds us of the dangers posed by the infected and introduces us to the “alphas” – the mutated version with increased physical strength and improved executive function. It also shows us how the survivors have retreated socially as well as physically into a kind of “little England”, a sly comment on Brexit if ever there was one.
Act Two expands our world – and Spike’s – as we meet a shipwrecked Swedish soldier (Edvin Ryding) who is slowly realising that he will never be leaving the hell that is northern England, and the mysterious Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) who has somehow managed to survive alone and Act Three is a profoundly emotional meditation on death. I was surprised to find myself weeping in a zombie movie but there you have it – 28 Weeks Later is Garland and Boyle at the peak of their formidable powers and is wonderfully unpredictable.
Kath Akuhata-Brown’s debut feature Kōkā is a puzzle that I have been pondering on for days. Not just timed for release at Matariki, it is explicitly about Matariki and the process of journeying from the land of the living to whatever comes next2. In the film, an older woman named Hamo departs her rest home for a long trip north to Tairāwhiti where she grew up. On the way, she hits a young Māori woman (Darneen Christian) with her Ford Falcon and becomes embroiled in her various dramas. Or rather they become embroiled in each other’s dramas.
That’s the surface story but it is clear from a very early stage that there’s what you might call ‘magic realism’ at play here. Nothing is quite as it seems which is good because most of the scenes that are ostensibly set in the real world don’t work in those terms at all.
I found myself questioning afterwards whether this was a film that was operating on an indigenous storytelling frequency that I was unable to tune in to or whether it was just not very good and I’ve come around to the conclusion that it is more the former than the latter (even if some of Akuhata-Brown’s choices still don’t work for me3).
The content below was originally paywalled.
For non-Māori such as myself, we can see concepts of Matariki and tangi as mythology – at least not to be taken literally – and Kōkā confusingly then lays further metaphorical material over the top of that, but for Māori that first layer is lived experience and therefore the symbolic aspects are much easier to digest. I don’t think I’m explaining myself very well and, while it’s clear that I’m not the primary audience for this film, it behooves me to think more deeply about it than I have been able to so far.
Elio is Pixar’s only release this year and after the stunning box office success last year of Inside Out 2, it has a lot riding on it. This is unfortunate because it’s not got broad enough shoulders, although it’s likeable enough. Elio (Yonas Kibreab) is an orphan – similar in age to Spike in 28 Years Later and similarly unwilling to do as he is told – who lives with his Aunt (Zoe Saldaña) who happily for this story works in a military installation that tracks orbiting space debris.
Elio is alienated from life and obsessed with the search for extra-terrestrial life and assumes that if he could go and meet alien lifeforms he would be much happier with them than he is down here. Amazingly enough, he gets his wish and for the most part his suspicions are correct, at least until he accidentally kicks off an interplanetary incident and realises that life on Earth isn’t so bad after all.
It’s a rickety plot – not normally as robust as Pixar usually constructs – and the three directors (Adrian Molina started the film but didn’t finish it, Madeleine Sarafian and Turning Red’s Domee Shi stepped in) have crammed the screen with so much stuff you don’t really know where to look. It has the same technicolour palette as Inside Out and its sequel but I’m missing when Pixar aimed for a cinematic look – Wall•E was 17 years ago!
If the intention behind the documentary portrait of the great filmmaking team Merchant Ivory was to send you scurrying to their back catalogue to watch (or rewatch) then the job is very much done. The editor-in-chief and I realised that neither of us had seen any of James Ivory’s 90s films after The Remains of the Day (1993) when they started to get proper studio support, budgets increased, behind-the-scenes drama reduced but so did box office and awards. Anyway, Jefferson in Paris, The Golden Bowl and The White Countess are on the ‘to watch’ list.
The documentary makes a lot of hay about how touch and go the finances always were on Merchant Ivory films but they presumably always made sure they got paid first as the gorgeous update New York compound where they eventually based themselves must have cost a pretty penny.
In another notable coincidence, last night I watched the final episode of the 1973 documentary series The World at War which is called “Remember” and which challenges the viewer not to forget the millions on all sides who perished in World War II.
You can hear Akuhata-Brown talking about the film with Mark Amery from RNZ here. Very interesting to understand more about her goals for the film.
I got off on the wrong foot with Kōkā because the geography is so odd. Several of the incidents were clearly shot in my own neighbourhood, pretending to be various other parts of New Zealand and I’ll grant you that most people won’t notice those specific shortcuts the way that I did.
