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‘A New Kind of Wilderness’ Review: A Grieving Family Returns to Civilization in a Heartsore Documentary
Silje Evensmo Jacobsen's moving doc 'A New Kind of Wilderness' follows wild-living British widower Nik Payne as he makes tough choices for his family.
Over idyllic shots of her hippy-hunky husband Nik and their three cherubic children camping, foraging for food and literally hugging trees in verdant Norwegian woodland, photographer Maria Vatne’s voiceover soothingly espouses the liberating virtues of “getting out of the rat race” and “being free and full of love.” It all looks wonderful, like “Swiss Family Robinson” updated for the era of Instagram cottagecore, and a cynic might say that it hardly seems sustainable. What began in 2014 as a portrait of a bilingual Norwegian-British family abandoning social norms to live as closely as possible with nature changed tack, following Vatne’s untimely death in 2019, to study the challenges of maintaining those ideals as a single-parent household burdened with grief. But Nik can’t afford to keep the smallholding on his own, which entails a compromised return to civilization: He takes a job as a manual laborer, moving the family into a modest house on another farm, while the children are prodded by the local education board into attending school three times a week.
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