The Convert (2024)

The Convert by Maori director Lee Tamahori is set in 1834, angry as his country is colonised by the British.

New Zealand's history lesson

by Alexa Dalby

The Convert
3.0 out of 5.0 stars

CAUTION: Here be spoilers

Guy Pearce is the mysterious central character Thomas Munro, now exported to be a priest to the British colonists in New Zealand in 1834, a crucial time pre the Declaration of Independence in 1835 and the all-important Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. It’s clear from the start that there’s more to Munro than meets the eye – apart from his back story, he has an openness to the new land and its culture that colonists lack. His ship’s captain saves him from danger ashore by speaking Maori to the Maori who want to kill him – the captain explains this by saying that you cannot trade with people you cannot communicate with.

Trade is the furthest limit of the colonists’ interest in the warlike Maori shown in the film: traders sell arms at a profit to both sides of the two warring tribes – peoples who are fighting each other and who did not even know how to use those out-moded rifles effectively.

Director Lee Tamahori (who made the iconic Once Were Warriors} is himself a Maori, smarting from the injustices that colonisation did to indigenous peoples. His film works in places, ironically best where it deals with white colonists.

The premise of The Convert is that Munro, sent halfway round the world to minister to his fellow white people, is open to and becomes enmeshed with the indigenous people he has come to convert and becomes converted to their natural way of life himself. This is initially similar to Godland, but the resemblance ends there. Underpinning the film is the historical background as Tamahori posits, through his mouthpiece of Munro, that if the warring Maori tribes led here by Maianui (Antonio Te Maioha) and Akatarewa (Lawrence Makoare) and their fearsome Maori warriors had not expended their energy in killing each other and instead had cooperated against the colonist ‘invaders’, they could have preserved their country, Aotearoa, for the Maori. It’s fascinating. Sadly, history tells us this did not happen and the British colonised the New World Downunder and still control it.

Munro tries to save chief’s daughter Rangiami (Tioreore Ngatai-Melbourne) but his efforts to integrate her into colonist society are met with hostility, as are all the Maori, no matter how Europeanised, by the smug colonists, apart from Charlotte (Jacqueline McKenzie), a shunned, transported woman who had previously become part of Maori society and speaks the language, thus acting as a bridge between the two cultures.

The Convert is an uneven but enjoyable, angry epic by a director with a robust anti-colonial, pro-first-nation worldview, particularly pertinent now as Charles III is controversially touring Australia.