Haere Mai
2024 · 9m · New Zealand
Directed by Benjamin McQueen
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
After prison for killing his best friend, a young man seeks forgiveness from the friend’s parents.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise reads like every other prison-redemption arc until you realize the film is actually interested in the parents' interior lives, not the killer's catharsis—it's almost anti-confession, which is refreshing, but the execution plays it safer than the setup deserves.
McQueen's restraint channels a lineage of intimate New Zealand cinema; the formal choice to hold on the parents' faces rather than cut away during moments of reckoning locates this film squarely in a tradition of ethical formalism that demands viewer complicity.
The entire film hinges on a single decision—shooting the apology scene in profile, so we can't read the killer's face—and that one choice transforms what could've been maudlin into something almost unbearably human and uncertain.