NZ Horror: Sleeping Dogs (Roger Donaldson, 1977)

After discovering his wife (Nevan Rowe) has had an affair with his best friend (Ian Mune), Smith (Sam Neill) abandons his family for a deserted island.

While Smith returns to land from exile, he finds the world he left behind has changed:

Spurred on by industrial unrest and some false flag actions, the New Zealand government has become a dictatorship, with an armed resistance movement and American military ‘advisors’ on-hand to fight them.

When he is arrested by the regime, Smith is forced to go on the run as a fugitive,

A resistance fighter by circumstance, will Smith have what it takes to save his family - and his country?

To celebrate the spooky season, The Midnight Ramble will be exploring a cinematic region it has only sparingly covered: New Zealand horror and genre cinema.

To inaugurate this programme, we start with Roger Donaldson’s nightmare vision of a near-future dystopia.

While modest on its own terms, Sleeping Dogs marked a landmark in New Zealand film when it was released in 1977.

The first New Zealand feature in over a decade (since John O’Shea’s Don’t Let It Get You), its success - along with new works by other filmmakers like Geoff Murphy - led to the creation of the New Zealand Film Commission.

I read the source novel, Smith’s Dream, as a teen. I was interested in alternative history and dystopian fiction, and it was one of the few local examples of the genre.

I watched Sleeping Dogs around the same time and remember being underwhelmed by it.

After Sam Neill passed away, I wanted to give it another look.

In light of the government’s increasingly authoritarian bent - and the US’s dropping its mask around the rules-based international order - it also felt appropriate for a reappraisal.

Written as an anti-Vietnam allegory, that message is somewhat muffled in the transition to film.

In its favour, Sleeping Dogs features some good photography, and some solid attempts at suspense.

However, the script is awash in cliches, aiming for a New Holllywood-style cynicism, but coming off as a vaguely competent action thriller.

The local cast range from fine to wooden: Neill would rubbish his performance but his unease is belayed by an inherent charisma.

American import Warren Oates adds some welcome swagger as an special forces commander who befriends Smith.

An important film in the history of NZ film, and an early showcase for future luminaries.

On its own terms, Sleeping Dogs is a crude but occasionally effective thriller.

With the direction NZ and world politics have taken in recent years, the film has a new sense of urgency that has more danger than the Muldoon-era fable was intended to evoke.

NZIFF: Remake (Ross McElwee, 2025)

With most of the films I saw at the NZ International Film Festival this year, I had almost no context going in. I only picked two films to watch, so I relied on my usher schedule to dictate what else I would write about.

McElwee directed Sherman’s March, a documentary I have been meaning to see for years.

Whenever I get to it, this film is going to hang over it. Indeed, this film will loom over his entire career. 

Remake is based around an attempt to adapt Sherman’s March into a feature film, and the death of Ross’s son Adrian (1989-2016), whose life had been partially documented through his father’s work.

A reflection on Ross’ss career, and relationship with his family, Remake is made up of footage from his previous films, and footage his son shot for his own unfinished project. 

Filmmaking is about control and choice - what we show and what we do not.

In going through his footage, and his motivations behind his choices, the filmmaker is trying to reckon with his career, and his relationship with his son.

Halfway through the film, it begins to condense in time, moving through all the footage Ross has covering the year leading up to his son’s death.

The ellipses of the footage mirror Ross’s sense of loss and desire to know more about his son’s internal life, and the life that was not captured on camera.

One sequence of Adrian’s footage included is a to-camera monologue his son shot, a familiar format for addressing the viewer - however, the younger McElwee forgot to record sound. So all we have is Adrian silently mouthing words at us - another avenue into knowing denied.

Another sequence  is made up of extended POV shots his son recorded while skiing.

Ross says it gives him a stronger sense of alignment - when Adrian/the camera stops in a clearing to survey the surroundings, Ross, as narrator, hypothesising on his son’s train of thought.

The elder McElwee shows some fear that his camera turned his son into an object, and put him at a distance from his family - now this footage is all he has.

Ross’s narration, the last element, the filmmaker’s attempt to provide context and understand, is ultimately a document of helplessness, regret and self-interrogation

As the film progresses, the lack of footage filmed by Ross himself becomes a metaphor for the changing relationship between parent and child - his son made his own choices, and he grew up into someone else.

A reflection on time, regret, and human subjectivity, Remake is a quietly devastating work - an act of cinematic self-laceration that by its very specificity, reaches toward a deeper human truth, one that haunts its filmmaker (and the viewer): the ultimate unknowability of the individual human experience.

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The History of Concrete

Late Fame

NZIFF: Late Fame (Kent Smith, 2026)

 When he is recognised on the street by a young poet, Meyers (Edmund Donovan), Ed Saxberger (Willem Dafoe) finds his settled life upended.

Swept into Meyers’ club of young artists, Saxberger is shocked to discover they are fans of a poetry collection he published as a young man.

Gratified by the attention - especially from actress Gloria (Greta Lee) - Saxberger joins the group.

Will the group inspire his muse? Or is the group just using Saxberger to trigger their own?

There is no way I would have seen this film without the festival. I like Willem Dafoe, but I do not keep up with his filmography.

I am glad I did.

Based on a novel by Arthur Schnitzler, the film is a perceptive, quietly satirical take on malaise and the desire to harken back to an imagined past.

Saxberger is introduced going about his days - working at the post office, drinking with friends.

He seems to be going through the motions of a routine.

When he is drawn into the group, it feels like he is suddenly energised.

There is an uneasy tension to the group’s dynamic - there is a vampiric quality to Meyers, and the way he and his friends seem to be more interested in the aesthetics of a Pat age.

Most of the people they associate with Saxberger are people he himself looked up to - the key difference is that he actually interacted with them. To him, Allen Ginsberg was a person, not a remote ideal stripped of humanity and context.

Saxberger also feels like a leftover from an earlier version of New York - a more egalitarian and desperate time, before the city remade itself for the wealthy parents of Meyers’ group.

The film plays on ego and vanity the club are a group of rich kids cosplaying as poor artists.

This is foregrounded in a hilariously deadpan scene in which our protagonist visits Meyers’ apartment. Dafoe never leans toward the joke. 

What makes the film fascinating is that Saxberger is not as invigorated as his new friends hope.

His interest is more human - he is a lonely man who sees an opportunity to connect with a woman.

Lee’s Gloria is the most heightened of the group - and the performer keeps that mask up for most of the runtime. Her front is a way to both join the group, and shelter her internal self.

 

It is a deceptively broad performance - but it is one of the elements that maintains the film’s underlying tension:

This group goes on about wanting to get at something more real - but they are ultimately all putting on a show for each other.

Jake Lacey has a great one-scene role as a wealthy editor who is interested in publishing Saxberger’s memoir - a sign of how is already being converted into an artefact of the past.

A great New York movie, and a fantastic showcase for Dafoe.

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The History of Concrete

NZIFF: The History of Concrete (John Wilson, 2026)

It is always the films you do not choose to see that end up surprising you the most. It’s a tired line with me and the NZ International Film Festival, but evergreen.

This film is a great test case.

Usually I leave movies as soon as they are done.

However, because I was an usher for this screening, I had the opportunity to get the audience’s reaction to the film.

And with History of Concrete I was very curious.

The reactions ran the gamut - from amusement to complete frustration.

I loved it. 

What starts out as an attempt at home renovation gone wrong turns into a quest - not just to learn about concrete, but the world we have built from it.

Every time Wilson meets a new person with a seemingly unrelated story or goal of their own, the film re-orients itself around this person.

The film goes in so many directions, I forgot that the initial ‘sequence’ is based around our heroes’ attendance at a creative writing workshop for Hallmark movies.

Thus, as we learn more about the titular substance, we also take in how it has affected Wilson’s city (the film could double as a document of the US’s decking infrastructure), and the story of the various denizens within it.

Recommended.

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Seoul Guardians

NZIFF: Seoul Guardians (Cho Chul-young, Kim Jong-woo, Shin-Wan Kim, 2026)

An on-scene chronicle of the siege of South Korea’s parliament in 2024, Seoul Guardians was not on my radar when I was looking at the listings for the NZIFF.

In December of that year, president Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law and referred to the opposition parties as supporters of North Korea.

This self-coup ended when parliamentarians passed a motion to cancel his declaration.

The president would later be impeached.

Happening a month after the US re-elected Donald Trump, it felt ironic. 

Trump had also attempted a coup four years earlier, but he had not been punished - and he was rewarded with a return to power.

South Korea’s response felt like a model of how to defend democracy.

Part of the reason for this rapid response - from MPs and ordinary citizens - is context.

South Korea had gone through a series of authoritarian governments, an era which only came to an end in the late eighties.

This is not the distant past or a hypothetical fear, something this film makes clear from the outset, intercutting the siege with brief cutaways to the infamous Gwangju massacre of 1980, an enduring symbol of the South Korean dictatorship, and the desire to avoid reverting back to it.

The film does not dwell on these events, preferring to let them linger in the background - the unspoken threat of how this attempted coup could have turned out.

There is some narration, but most of the film is presented as a fly on the wall, intercutting between different news cameras and phones - providing a truly subjective impression from inside the parliament.

 There is a raw immediacy and claustrophobia to this footage, as we are placed among the staffers struggling to barricade the doors against the military units trying to shut down proceedings.

It is chilling and - despite knowing how it resolved - incredibly tense.

Watching legislators try to follow processes while soldiers are literally outside the doors emphasises how tenuous democracy truly is.

And even though the coup attempt was thwarted, there is no sense of catharsis:

The film ends intercutting the anti-government protests with the president’s supporters.

The President’s coup may have failed - but the forces he represents remain.

Seoul’s guardians have won this one battle, but the fight for democracy will continue.   

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