From this ambitious talent comes a major production about three cousins – Mata, Makareta, and Missy – who, despite losses and the passage of time, remain connected to their ancestral bond. Like the novel, the film moves back and forth in time between post-World War II Aotearoa and the early 1990s, while simplifying the novel’s six point-of-view narrative structure. Close-up frames of braided hair visualise the trio’s separate but intertwined lives, a potent motif present in the novel but not so much in the film, where Makareta and Missy’s narratives contrast with Mata’s absence – severed from her family in early childhood - rather than standing on their own.

In the opening scene, middle-aged Mata (Tanea Heke) wanders around Wellington. The camera emphasises the micro-movements by closing in on her cracked feet and weathered face. Any sound, like the sizzling market wok or the beeping pedestrian crossing, is abrasive. Her reactions are measured and secretive, like a protective balm. This opening scene emphasises Mata’s shrewd awareness as the film’s main perspective.

Young Mata (Te Raukura Gray) grows up in a religious orphanage, placed there by her negligent guardian Mrs Parkinson (Sylvia Rands). Frequent straight-on angles reveal Gray’s diligent facial control with telling twitches of her eyes and mouth. Languid shots as she looks down at objects in her hand – a lolly, a feather, a marble – further embody her careful gaze.  

Over time, Mata’s sense of personhood becomes foggy. Some moments are curiously bright, such as the memory of one family Christmas. Yet her whitewashed childhood – her name and language changed from Māori to English – leads to an awkward relationship with her identity. In the book, a matron at the orphanage cuts Mata’s hair, ‘pressing the springy curls down as best she could – bad curls that had to be cut, cut, cut’, then Mata must ‘sweep up all the bad curls’. In the film, Mrs Parkinson repeats this assault on the young adult Mata (Ana Scotney) by brushing her curls, grumbling, ‘This is how you brush coarse hair.’ Mata looks ahead, expressionless. In this way, her trauma remains mostly unaddressed, as if she exists adrift in a quasi-humourised dreamscape, protected from perceiving her suffering. By the time she walks listlessly around Wellington in middle age, as in the opening scene and during the film, Mata appears like a vessel empty of cultural impetus: her unwilled alienation equated to a loss of self.

The characterisation of Makareta and Missy balance out Mata’s troubled plight. Missy (Rachel House, Hariata Moriarty, Keyahne Patrick Williams) spends her young and adult life within Māori culture, one of abundance, warm colours, energetic family, and plentiful food. Meanwhile, Makareta (Briar Grace-Smith, Tioreore Ngatai-Melbourne, Mihi Te Rauhi Daniels) first appears as a well-groomed child anxious about her culture’s failings. She briefly fractures her relationship with her whānau before a gripping aerial shot of her receiving tā moko (a Māori tattoo) reaffirms her cultural integrity. In the same sequence, she addresses her university class with the striking phrase, ‘How can we ensure the return to Māori, and of those precious things that have been all but lost?’

Te Raukura Gray as Young Mata, Mihi Te Rauhi Daniels as Young Makareta, and Keyahne Patrick Williams as Young Missy in Cousins (Vendetta Films)

Colonial structures permeate the film without a central antagonist, only briefly personified by Mrs Parkinson describing Māori people as ‘uncivilised’ in earshot of Mata. Eurocentrism falls by the wayside; there is little that is ethnographic or pedagogical about this film written, directed, and performed by Māori women centring their perspective as dominant. When surveyors trespass on the family land, they are a miniature threat to Missy standing on the hill above them. In the same way, Grace-Smith and Gardiner limit patriarchy’s presence when dealing with feminist themes. Male figures are given little screen time and even less dialogue: when Makareta rejects a taumau (arranged marriage), the emotional reactions of female relatives in focusa while the men of the family sit quietly next to them, almost out of frame.

As a result, Cousins holds its own as a story of the sororal yearning and intergenerational care of indigenous women, and the directors give little heed to anything that detracts from that. The gentle, inward-looking approach of Cousins compares to recent trans-Tasman film High Ground (2021), which, while covering similar territory around First Nations bravery in preserving family bonds, gives more stage time to white saviours and violent antagonists, as also did Jennifer Kent’s 2018 Nightingale.

Aesthetically satisfying, sometimes cold, Cousins enchants rather than shocks its audience, despite its traumatic premise. Bodies move slowly; sound concentrates on pulsating wind, breaths, and sobs, like omnipresent thoughts more potent than the spoken word. Childhood scenes carry the warmth of core memories; the present day broods with muted colours. The family land has a greater sense of place than nameless dull towns and cities. The hills are fluorescent green, the water sparkles.

This visceral style links the scenes, but without a metronomic feel. The loose balance of time leaves narratives open-ended, with something poetic in their singularity while others feel bare or have a montage feel. Concisely scenes in the cousins’ later life have little space for adequate depth; they feel superficial compared to the sparsely arranged, sensual early memories. This approach leads to adult Missy – despite Rachel House’s veracious acting – falling victim to compressed storylines and underdeveloped characterisation. Such brevity often afflicts films that attempt to maximise the original book’s plot instead of adopting a more spacious approach to storytelling.

Given its broad sweep, it’s surprising that the film spans only ninety minutes; it feels much longer, and Mata’s psychological praxis stays with the audience long after. Melancholic and yet hopeful, Cousins stands as a distinctive contribution to New Zealand cinema and a dignified interpretation of Māori women’s lives in the second half of the twentieth century.

Cousins (Vendetta Films), 98 minutes, directed by Briar Grace-Smith and Ainsley Gardiner. In cinemas now.