16-05-2025
A New Kind of Wilderness review — off-grid family grief in Norway
With a structure, characters and dramatic tension that echo the Oscar-nominated Viggo Mortensen movie Captain Fantastic, this tear-jerking documentary tells the story of an Englishman, Nik Payne, who in 2014 with his Norwegian wife, Maria, and their four children abandoned civilisation for the off-grid bliss of a remote farm in Norway's northern woods. Five years later, however, Maria died of cancer, and Nik honoured her legacy by continuing to pursue a wilderness-based subsistence lifestyle with all its (single) parenting challenges.
The film, from the Norwegian director Silje Jacobsen, is a contradictory beast that picks up the story soon after Maria's death and depicts a family ensconced in glorious scenery and yet cauterised by grief. It hangs over the smallest activity — one of the
