TIFF21: Night Raiders

Night Raiders, the debut feature from Canadian filmmaker Danis Goulet, tries to be an Indigenous-led Children of Men but ends up more like The Hunger Games. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. However, it is indicative of how elements of Night Raiders, such as its chosen hero narrative, generic dystopian baddies, and vaguely-defined futuristic world set after a war, bear a lot of resemblance to popular Young Adult dystopias from the past decade. The film’s obvious allegory for the residential school system is its strongest component, and gives it an urgency that isn’t found in other contemporary dystopian fiction. But that allegory can only go so far when the narrative elements are so indistinct.

Set in a post-war North America in 2044, the film follows a mother and daughter, Niska (Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers) and Waseese (Brooklyn Letexier-Hart), who live off the grid in the northern forests so as to keep Waseese from the hands of the authoritarian state, who intern children (of all ethnic groups) in re-education camps. But when Waseese steps on a bear trap and her wound grows infected, Niska is forced to give up her daughter to the authorities to save her life. Night Raiders is about what happens to Niska and Waseese in the wake of this decision: Niska on the decimated outside world, Waseese inside the camp, forced to lose her identity and conform to a colonial culture that is not her own.

The parallels to the residential school system in Canada are obvious from the description, and anguish and anger over this historical injustice fuels the film beginning-to-end. It accounts for the difference between this film and other Young Adult dystopias such as The Hunger Games and Divergent. In The Hunger Games, for instance, the violence and pageantry of the games offer an avenue to explore class warfare and entertainment as propaganda, but the situation that created the games has to be constantly explicated within the stories to ensure that viewers understand how such a world was made possible. But with Night Raiders, such explication is not necessary. The tragedy of this film is situated in history and wordlessly acknowledged in every bit of worldbuilding and conflict. You never ask yourself, “Could this happen for real?” because it already did, and not too long ago either.

But just because Night Raiders engages with the enormous legacy of the residential school system does not automatically mean it works as a film. Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers is a stalwart hero as Niska; taciturn, striking, and capable of expressing a lot through her eyes. Brooklyn Letexier-Hart is a little less sure-footed in her approach, but her discomfort with some line readings is made up for with a relatable ease in her physicality; you never question her physical reactions to her surroundings, which does a lot to make the worldbuilding credible. But beyond these two central performances, there’s not a lot to distinguish the film from other generic dystopias.

The worldbuilding is limited by budget—the filmmakers simply don’t have the money to conjure a world to the scale of the Capitol in The Hunger Games—and the details of life in the authoritarian system are tropes familiar to most films of this sort: shantytowns, monochromatic soldiers, vaguely-fascist rhetoric, and a narrow view of normal life. The emotional core of the film—that of a mother heartbroken over forced separation from her daughter, and a daughter’s anguish over being stolen from her culture—is credible, but the worldbuilding isn’t. You never get a sense of how the world operates or why, who the villains actually are, and why people living in the shadow of the police state don’t all take to the woods like Niska in the early moments. You get a sense of how Indigenous people are well-suited to leading a resistance to such colonization, since they’ve experienced it before, but that’s about the extent to which the film defines the characters’ culture on screen. Children of Men is the ideal for which this film strives, but that film showed how people are able to go about a relatively normal life under the weight of a despairing world system. This film does not depict the details of ordinary life.

Night Raiders reminds me a great deal of Jeff Barnaby’s Blood Quantum. Not only do both films star Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, but they’re both genre films about Indigenous characters with hefty allegorical tones that reflect on the colonization and evisceration of Indigenous communities across North America. They’re both technically well-made, with talented actors and provocative concepts that force viewers to confront the historical atrocities perpetrated against Indigenous peoples. But they’re also a bit rote when it comes to genre tropes and character arcs. For all its righteous anger and potent allegorical meaning, Night Raiders, like Blood Quantum before it, ends up as another mostly fine, but generic dystopian thriller.

Beyond its allegorical framework, Night Raiders is familiar. But shouldn’t such a potent allegory be enough to sustain a film, to give it meaning? Perhaps. It’s hard to feel like Night Raiders is a failure when there are so few genre films made by Indigenous filmmakers in our current cinematic landscape. That it’s willing to tackle the legacy of residential schools is laudable and still rare in Canadian cinema, and makes it thematically innovative if extremely conventional in most other respects. But the film’s ending epitomizes how Night Raiders whiffs on its promise. Despite its potent thematic approach and the narrative possibility of its Indigenous perspective, the film ends up playing into generic Young Adult conventions, with an unsatisfying final standoff and a seemingly-magical resolution around its chosen hero that borders on the absurd. The ending shows that all of its innovation is restricted to its central allegory; everything else is disappointingly conventional science-fiction dystopia.

Furthermore, good science-fiction is about more than simply litigating the past; it’s about illuminating the possibility of the future. Unfortunately, there is no illuminating vision of the future in Night Raiders, no vision of the world that is not familiar from our past and present. It is stuck in reflection mode, handcuffed by genre instead of being liberated by it.

5 out of 10

Night Raiders (2021, Canada/New Zealand)

Written and directed by Danis Goulet; starring Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, Brooklyn Letexier-Hart, Alex Tarrant, Amanda Plummer, Violet Nelson.

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