THE CONVERT ★★★★ (MA) 119 minutes It’s 1830 and lay preacher Thomas Munro (Guy Pearce) is about to join a cluster of British settlers who have made a precarious home for themselves on a stretch of land on the west coast of New Zealand’s South Island. It looks like a place fit only for the brave, desperate or crazily optimistic, and Munro is a bit of all three. Tioreore Ngatai-Melbourne as Rangimai and Guy Pearce as Thomas Munro in The Convert.
Credit: Kismet He’s out to relieve his guilt over those he killed as a soldier in the British army by devoting the rest of his life to good works. But it’s already very clear things aren’t going to play out as planned. His ship is greeted by a storm, and before he gets the chance to meet his new parishioners he’s in the middle of a skirmish between two warring Maori tribes.
The parishioners, too, turn out to be a disappointment, having come equipped with a sanctimonious sense of their superiority. Even though they pay rent for the land, they predictably regard their Maori landlords as savages, and when Munro asks the settlement’s doctor to treat the wounded Maori princess he has rescued from the fight, he refuses. It’s up to Jacqueline McKenzie, cast as another dissident spirit, to help.
Charlotte Hegarty is a healer who’s been transported to the colonies on a charge of petty theft, and although McKenzie seems a little too classy for the role of a convict she brings a credible Scottish accent to the job, along .
