For the last few years, I have used October to give myself a viewing assignment: a different horror film each day. Now that I have escaped the real life horror of New Zealand’s public service, I intend to write a piece inspired by each film.
The First cab off the rank is Garth Maxwell’s Jack Be Nimble (1993).
Note that while I will endeavour to publish a piece each day, I don’t want to spam everyone with emails so will publish without an email from day 2 onwards.
Jack Be Nimble made its way onto my radar earlier in the year when I was privileged to be able to get an early look at a manuscript for an (outstanding) upcoming New Zealand book. I can’t provide any detail about the book in question but I can say that the author mentioned in passing that Jack Be Nimble was the greatest New Zealand film ever made, notably for the way it balances horror and whimsy.
I was intrigued. There are several New Zealand horror films I like a lot but I don’t really associate our national cinema with great horror. I personally subscribe to the theory posited by Sam Neill in Cinema of Unease, that our national cinema (or pākehā cinema specifically) is “uniquely strange and dark.” If the non-genre work of Roger Donaldson or Jane Campion or Vincent Ward is already strange and dark, then where does that leave a filmmaker who wants to go full horror? For many, it means becoming less grounded and more excessive—think early Peter Jackson or recent films like Deathgasm or (the really fun, underseen) The Paragon.
I may be late to the party on Jack Be Nimble (which is on me, it was featured in Neill’s documentary afterall), I can totally see why someone would praise it as an elevation of the form. While most horror films made in Aotearoa depart entirely from New Zealand anxieties (even if films like Black Sheep superficially dabble in the iconography), Maxwell’s keeps one foot on the ground even as it gets heightened and silly.
It follows siblings Jack (Alexis Arquette) and Dora (Sarah Smuts-Kennedy) who are adopted out to very different families at a young age. As young adults, they use their latent psychic connection to locate one another and avenge the wrongs of their past. They are joined by Bruno Lawrence (in the Scatman Crothers part) in one of his final roles.
As New Zealanders, we are taught that our national identity was forged on the beaches of Gallipoli, that it took getting our asses handed to us by the Turks to snap us out of our blind subservience to the British Empire. In this narrative, repeated each April, the Ottomans are recast as honourable opponents instead of a European Empire no different to our colonial masters in terms of genocidal intent. From the Great War on, (pākehā) New Zealanders would get a clean break from history, forming an identity that eschewed the uptight rigidity of the poms in favour of number-8 wire, good on ya mate egalitarianism. All that colonialism carry on was the fault of the British, we’re kiwis.
Of course, this narrative is a conservative fantasy. Just because pākehā tell themselves stories about themselves that invisibilise the sins of their fathers, doesn’t mean that those sins disappear. We are no more emancipated from the past than the United States were when they declared independence from the UK. So what happens when we confront that history?
In Jack Be Nimble, each child finds themself in a household that is as disconnected from history as it is from their sibling. For Dora, this means a loving home in the suburbs with adoptive parents that love her as their own. Jack on the other hand, ends up living on the kind of nasty dirt farm that characterises New Zealand films like Vigil and Bread and Roses. He is relentlessly abused by the cruel couple that adopts him and their four evil daughters. The true distinction the film makes though, is not between suburban and rural life (they are able to break down those barriers pretty easily) but between the different ways they relate to their parents (and therefore their past).
For Jack, escaping from his past means killing it. He builds a contraption (good on ya mate) that enables him to violently dispose of his abusers while Dora tries to forge a path forward that reconciles the past (with which she maintains a psychic connection) with the future. As is often the case, Lawrence is the special sauce, lending a screen presence that tends to imply a straddling of different worlds (this is a guy who was a kiwi bloke onscreen and a hippie dippie muso offscreen).
Just to be clear, Jack Be Nimble is an absolute blast, it moves deftly between space and time and it is no less gnarly for its thematic resonance.