Starring: Elijah Wood, Nell Fisher, Michael Smiley, Vanessa Stacy
Distributor: Rialto Distribution
Runtime: 102 mins. Reviewed in Aug 2024
Reviewer: Fr Peter Malone msc
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Eleven-year-old Mildred’s world is turned upside down when her estranged father, the washed-up magician Strawn Wise, comes to look after her and agrees to take her camping to find a mythological beast known as the Canterbury Panther.
A family story from New Zealand, but not quite the story we might have expected. It follows soon after the release of that fine NZ film about three children climbing Mount Taranaki, The Mountain. This time we are on the South Island, in the Canterbury Plains. The bookworm of the title is an 11-year-old girl, Mildred (Fisher). She is a reader, a thinker, precocious for her age – and not immediately sympathetic for the audience (this reviewer may be open to correction by young girls of Mildred’s age). She is supportive of her mother who has had addiction problems in the past. No sign of a father.
The opening credits indicate a government statement that there are no animals in New Zealand which pose a threat to human life. Which means the premise of this story moves us into fantasy and imagination – a black panther haunting the mountains above the Canterbury Plains. Mildred has great ambitions to find the panther and submitting evidence to the authorities to claim a substantial reward, which she intends to use for her mother’s health.
An incident with a toaster and electric shock confines her mother to hospital after she had promised to take Mildred camping. Then, an odd -looking man arrives. A professional magician he tries out some tricks on a first interested then sceptical Mildred. Mildred learns he is her father, encountering Mildred’s mother in Las Vegas years earlier.
We know that there will be a bonding between father and daughter eventually, despite the sometimes supercilious ignoring of her father and criticism of him by Mildred, and his bewilderment as he tries to understand her. And he agrees to go camping with her, never having done so in his life, climbing steep mountains, pitching tents, making fires . . .
There are some further adventures in some spectacularly photographed scenery, especially when the panther materialises. And there are some rather comic-book villains, an odd couple but get their comeuppance. There is a whole lot of action – the panther, cliffs, a rope bridge . . . And an amusing hospital sequence. Elijah Wood, returning to New Zealand after his Frodo days, is the magician.
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