Dominic Corry looks ahead at some of the most exciting films from Aotearoa New Zealand in 2025.
As bountiful as 2024 was for NZ cinema (my faves of the year were The Convert and Head South), we must always look forward, and 2025 has multiple offerings of note to get excited about.
Many of the titles mentioned here currently lack specific release dates, but are generally thought to be coming out this year. But I can’t guarantee it.
Also, I am including foreign-funded films that were shot here but aren’t set in New Zealand (Minecraft [the game] doesn’t take place in Aotearoa, right? The environment certainly projects a Kiwi-like verdancy…), as there are quite a few of those coming down the pike, and not a massive amount of truly local films…
The Haka Party Incident
The first proper local release of the year that I can discern is The Haka Party Incident, a documentary exploring an ugly situation from recent history that saw Pākehā students at the University of Auckland violently overreact when Māori and Pasifika activists protested a mock haka that had been regularly performed during capping week.
Katie Wolfe directs the film, expanded from her own stage play. It played to positive notices at last year’s film festival, and is in theatres January 30th.
Wolf Man (2025)
But before that, there’s Leigh Whannell’s Wolf Man releasing this week. One of the first productions to shoot in Upper Hutt’s recently-constructed Lane Street Studios, the Pacific Northwest-set film (we do a good Pacific Northwest in NZ, and this production features some impressive wide canvas outdoor locations) stars Christopher Abbott (a lupine actor if there ever was one) and Julia Garner. Whannell shook up another iconic Universal Monster property with his last movie (The Invisible Man), and it’ll be interesting and exciting to see what he’s done with this one. In Upper Hutt.
Alien Weaponry: Kua Tupu Te Ara
I featured documentary Alien Weaponry: Kua Tupu Te Ara in last year’s preview, but that slipped down a bit and is now releasing on February 6th.
Tinā (2025)
Miki Magasiva’s Tinā (releasing February 27th) promises to bring a welcome Polynesian flavour to the well-established “outsider comes to stuffy school and shakes things up” genre.
This one concerns a Samoan teacher named Merata (Anapela Polataivao, who recurred on Our Flag Means Death) who, following the death of her daughter in the Christchurch earthquakes, takes a job as a substitute teacher at a posh school, and proceeds to—you guessed it—shake things up, when she forms and trains a choir for a national competition.
Despite the well-trodden ground, the power of this film is pretty evident in the trailer, and the local specificity is extremely appealing.
The Rule of Jenny Pen
James Ashcroft made one of the most attention-grabbing New Zealand films of the last five years in 2021’s Coming Home in the Dark, an extremely dark, ice-cold thriller which indicated the arrival of a bold filmmaker and made me excited for his follow-up.
That is finally arriving in the form of The Rule of Jenny Pen, which like Ashcroft’s previous film, is adapted from a short story by Owen Marshall. Imports John Lithgow and Geoffrey Rush star alongside local legends Ian Mune, Nathaniel Lees and George Henare (and Tom Sainsbury, halfway to legend status) in the creepy-looking thriller. Lithgow plays a man at a rest home who torments the other residents with a plastic baby hand puppet—Rush plays a judge who can’t believe what he’s witnessing.
I still can’t tell if Lithgow is doing an Aussie or a Kiwi accent in the trailer, but he makes anything good, so I was already amped for this one before Stephen King lent his endorsement, calling it one of the best movies he saw last year. It’s released in NZ on March 20th, apparently the final stop on an oddly protracted theatrical journey.
A Minecraft Movie
Arguably the largest film production staged in New Zealand that doesn’t involve Hobbits or Na’vi is A Minecraft Movie, which despite the aforementioned verdancy, doesn’t promise to showcase a whole heap of local scenery. Or maybe it will, it’s hard to make much sense of that trailer. The main thing is, Jack Black probably knows what L&P tastes like now. That is released on April 3rd.
M3GAN 2.0
Kiwi writer/director Gerard Johnstone (Housebound) did an impressive job of making Auckland seem like the US (again, I think it was supposed to be the Pacific Northwest) in the 2022 breakout hit M3GAN, and Blumhouse rehired him for the scaled-up, also-shot-in-New Zealand sequel M3GAN 2.0, in which everybody’s favourite murderous-robot-friend-who-went-viral (once again “played” by Amie Donald and voiced by Jenna Davis) returns alongside part one stars Allison Williams and Violet McGraw. Local lad Jemaine Clement joins the cast of the sequel, which is coming out on June 26th.
Plot details for the film are still under wraps, but I visited the set during filming and it looks freaking amazing.
Excepting the title at the bottom of the page, that’s pretty much it for movies with locked-in release dates, but we can reasonably expect to see the following projects at some point this year:
Director Rob Sarkies dramatised one of New Zealand’s darkest days with 2006’s Out of the Blue (which depicted the Aramoana shootings) and his upcoming film Pike River dives into another tragic incident, focusing on the impact of the 2010 mining disaster’s impact on the local community, as well as the victims’ families (who were consulted for the film) and their fight for justice. Melanie Lynskey, Robyn Malcolm and Lucy Lawless (our three greatest actresses?) lead the cast.
Aaron Paul, Eiza González and Iko Uwais star in spacebound sci-fi thriller Ash, which (as you can see above) has a pretty rad trailer. The NZ-shot film is directed by DJ/producer/musician/director Flying Lotus, and the Kiwi contingent consists of Kate Elliot and Beaulah Koale (Next Goal Wins), who coincidentally also starred opposite Aaron Paul in 2022’s Dual.
Ex-pat Kiwi Andrew Niccol, a former ad man who made his name with the screenplay for The Truman Show and went on to write and direct films such as Gattaca and Lord of War, returned to New Zealand to make the intriguing I, Object.
The exact nature of the project (which features big-name Kiwi actors like Karl Urban, Jemaine Clement and Thomasin McKenzie) remains somewhat ambiguous, but magical realism appears to be in play according to the logline, which describes a ten-year-old boy grieving the death of his father who begins communicating with (otherwise) inanimate objects around him. Niccol has made a career out of high-concept storytelling, so it’ll be interesting to see what he does here. I wonder if it is set in New Zealand.
Kōkā
Kath Akuhata-Brown writes and directs road movie Kōkā, which charts the relationship between a Māori elder and a delinquent teenager.
And internationally successful New Zealand singer/songwriter Marlon Williams is the subject of a documentary directed by Ursula Williams titled Marlon Williams: Ngā Ao e Rua – Two Worlds.
Avatar: Fire and Ash
Then to end the year on December 18th, we have Avatar: Fire and Ash, the third film in iconic filmmaker/Wairarapa resident James Camerons’ epic sci-fi franchise.
While there ain’t much of our landscape to be seen in these movies, some of our actors get a look-in (hoping/suspecting we’ll see more of Jemaine Clement in this one) and it’s not difficult to discern the cultural influence Aotearoa has over the alien worlds depicted here. And they would be nothing without the boffins at Wētā FX.
