Ricky Baker, Uncle Hec, and the Manhunt for Two People Who Were Fine

A film review, in memory of Sam Neill, 1947–2026 — who ended his eulogies as a dinosaur wrangler and should have ended them as a foster uncle.

Sam Neill passed away in July, and the tributes naturally focused on the dinosaur film roles. Fair enough; it’s heroic. But at our house we went back to the New Zealand bush, to a battered green jacket and a hat in the same condition. Sam Neill, playing along with his NZ colleague Taika Waititi, played a man whose feelings arrive three scenes after everybody else’s, and he makes you wait for them since that uncomfortableness is where the richness hides.

Hunt for the Wilderpeople opens with a child being delivered to a farm the way a parcel is delivered to a porch. Ricky Baker, thirteen, arrives in the back of a child-welfare car while his caseworker, Paula, reads out his file like a criminal indictment: disobedience. Stealing. Spitting. Running away. Throwing rocks. Kicking stuff. Burning stuff. Loitering. The list is comedy because of its rhythm and tragedy because of its genre. It is a life written entirely by other people, a boy rendered as a constellation of fixed offenses, every point plotted, nothing left alive. The German sociologist Hartmut Rosa has a distinction for this: a Konstellation is an arrangement you read from outside, settled and done; a Situation is open, still happening, still able to answer. Paula reads constellations for a living. The whole film is the story of a boy getting his situation back.

The person who gives it back first is Bella. She meets the car with a hug Ricky doesn’t know what to do with, feeds him until he cannot move, and on his birthday sings him a song she made up herself, with a hot-water bottle for a present and his name in the chorus. It is the single greatest depiction of belovedness on a budget in modern film. Bella has no training, no framework, no trauma-informed anything. She has a table, a song, and the radical policy of liking him. Watch Ricky’s face during that birthday song and you can watch a case-file turning back into a boy. The Fujimuras would call what Bella does culture care, the tending of soil rather than the winning of wars, and her farm is the soil, and it works so fast it’s almost embarrassing to the professions.

Then Taika Waititi weaves his magic, the thing that makes him the patron saint of wounded comedy: it takes Bella away, off screen, without warning, and refuses to stop being funny about everything else. Grief lands in the middle of the jokes because that is where grief lands. The minister at the funeral (Waititi himself) delivers a eulogy about doors that is somehow about nothing and everything, the worst sermon ever preached and completely true. And Ricky processes the loss the only way his file ever equipped him to: haiku. His counselor once taught him haiku “to express his feelings,” and the film plays it for laughs right up until the laughs stop covering, and a thirteen-year-old’s three-line poems become the truest grief journal in the picture. Five lines a night on your own phone; three lines in the bush. The instrument does not care. It only asks that you write it yourself.

What follows is a “manhunt,” because the state (read ‘system’) cannot tell the difference between a missing child and a free one. Hec and Ricky go into the bush. Initially by accident, and then on principle! Paula escalates like a woman auditioning for a war film, declaring “no child left behind” with the exact energy of someone who has left this particular child behind at every opportunity that mattered. Helicopters. Roadblocks. A reward. The bureaucracy that could not fund a birthday song finds infinite budget for pursuit, which is the sharpest joke Waititi tells and he never once winks at it: processing scales beautifully; formation does not scale at all, it just works.

And in the bush, unfunded and unsupervised, the actual social services happen. Ricky, who reads, teaches Hec, who can’t. Hec, who survives, teaches Ricky, who never had the chance. A boy who has been fostered his whole life fosters a grieving old man back to life, and vice versa, and neither of them would ever use those words, that’s why it works. Sam Neill plays all of this at a core temp just above freezing (a man thawing slowly so you only notice by comparing scenes an hour apart) and it is acting so enjoyable because of this strangeness, it doesn’t look like acting. Ricky has a word for the moments the bush hands them, the waterfalls and ridgelines no caseworker will ever inventory: majestical. It is not a real word. That is why it fits. Some things are only sayable in words the file doesn’t have.

We won’t tell you how it ends, except to say there is one more haiku, and it earns everything the first ones were mocked for.

Rest well, Sam Neill. The obituaries highlighted Jurassic Park, but they were wrong. I think your finest hour was a man in a battered jacket who did not want the kid, and kept him anyway, and became, in the words this shelf keeps using because the film taught them to us, one adult who stays.

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Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016), written and directed by Taika Waititi from Barry Crump’s Wild Pork and Watercress. The film’s seat is on our Film Shelf — the teenager’s window, where it holds the foundational spot. August 2026.