The year is 2043. A military occupation controls disenfranchised cities in post-war North America. Children are property of the State. A desperate Cree woman joins an underground band of vigilantes to infiltrate a State children’s academy and get her daughter back. Night Raiders is a female-driven dystopian drama about resilience, courage, and love.
To put it bluntly and succinctly, Night Raiders is a mixed bag. This dystopian flick, written in 2015 Pre-Trump and pre-COVID, manages to blur the lines of reality and speculative dramatization well. If the film had been created and released back in 2015 it would have generated a much larger impact, but in 2022, the idea of building a border wall, increased surveillance and governmental control, locking up children away from their parents, and creating a division between the wealthy and those in poverty through mandates...it all feels very familiar.
These elements do actually work well to assist the audience to relate to, and empathize with, our protagonists. That familiarity of events, effectively questions the knowledge and awareness that this film is occurring two decades in the future. It feels like it very much could be happening now. Considering the history of Canadian Indian residential schools, is not dissimilar to Australia's Aboriginal Stolen Generation, or New Zealand's own history of Māori abuse at the hands of our government's Oranga Tamariki organization. All examples of the nation's powerful and elite taking the land and children of the Indigenous populations, in the name of "developing" or "saving" them, in acts that lead to cultural persecution, erasure, and eradication.
The film envisions lofty political and cultural commentary, and builds a convincing visual dystopia, effectively categorizing each side of the conflict by contrasting the indigenous Cree populations living in the lush bush and forestry with the powerful government that controls the dead cities, steeped in unsaturated brown and grey colour palettes.
Director and screenwriter Danis Goulet successfully uses our sense of familiarity to quickly create a world that we recognize but has twisted elements in a fashion that creates a lot of intrigue and mystery. Goulet is sparse and selective in the information and context that they provide and it creates a world that the audience wants to know more about. To its detriment, Night Raiders is so coy with the explanations for its differences, that you leave the theatre with more questions than answers. We are faced with a number of exciting events and pathways, however, while the film progresses, the character development and context for these decisions are arbitrary and underdeveloped.
The protagonists are also underdeveloped, with extremely minimal characterization. the film hits all of the dystopian thriller plot points but struggles to integrate its indigenous elements fully into the story. With a number of characters, locations, and interactions throughout a minimal 100-minute runtime, relationships and related interactions are rushed. It is unknown whether certain characters were added late in the process, or their arcs stripped from the film in the editing process, but they are left feeling out of place and forced.
Our mother-daughter duo, Niska and Waseese (portrayed by Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and Brooklyn Letexier-Hart respectively) are the highlights of the film. Niska's visual appearance is gaunt, and her drive is unavoidable, unfortunately, no time is allowed to fully develop her emotional connections and motivations, leaving her character an empty shell that is otherwise being passively pushed from one situation into another. Waseese's development is quite well-balanced when you bear in mind that she is a child, her appearance degrading as the film progresses under her incarceration.
With intriguing visual environments and effectively executed special effects, Goulet has done wonders with world-building. It is a world that the audience wants to know more about. Great acting from Tailfeathers and Letexier-Hart can't make up for thin characterizations and a tick-box dystopian thriller structure. Still worth a watch, as a reminder of the capabilities of a powerful body that does not respect its inhabitants equally, but you can't help but feel that there is a lot of context and character development sitting on the cutting room floor in favour of a short run-tim, waiting for their chance to shine in a director's cut.
Night Raiders is in cinemas from March 24, 2022