Real piece of work, this one.
For his follow-up to What We Do in the Shadows, co-written and directed with Jemaine Clement, Taika Waititi wrote and directed Hunt for the Wilderpeople, a decidedly more down-to-earth affair. At the start, it's about a troubled foster kid named Ricky Baker (Julian Dennison, an extraordinary find) who finds an unlikely home at the remote farm of the bighearted Bella Faulkner (Rima Te Wiata, also extraordinary). Things take a turn, though, when her gruff husband Hector (Sam Neill) becomes his reluctant guardian after Bella is tragically taken out of the picture and Ricky flees into the bush rather than get taken back by child welfare. Its representative, Paula (Rachel House), incidentally, is adamant about no child being "left behind" on her watch, and doggedly pursues them over the months that they remain fugitives. (Shades of Tilda Swinton's "social services" in Moonrise Kingdom, now that I come to think of it.)
Utterly charming from start to finish, Hunt for the Wilderpeople neatly sidesteps many of the "curmudgeon who bonds with spunky kid" traps it could have easily fallen into. A lot of this has to do with Neill's finely calibrated performance as Hector (Hec for short) who would just as soon dump the kid at his earliest convenience. It also helps that the few people they encounter -- like the trio of hunters eager to claim the sizable reward for Ricky's return -- are quirky without being overbearingly so. (The lone exception is the self-styled Psycho Sam, played by What We Do's werewolf pack leader, Rhys Darby, but that's all right as he's meant to be a bit barmy.) Best of all, Waititi gives his protagonists enough time and space to form a natural attachment without it being forced on them by plot contrivance or convenience.