Friendship Forged Through Persistence

Read Time:5 Minute, 15 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
Pike River
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Genre: Drama
Year Released: 2025, 2026
Runtime: 2h 18m
Director(s): Robert Sarkies
Writer(s): Fiona Samuel
Cast: Melanie Lynskey, Robyn Malcolm, Lucy Lawless
Where to Watch: in select theaters and on Digital January 30, 2026

RAVING REVIEW: How long can grief survive before it turns into resolve? PIKE RIVER doesn’t rush toward that question; it sits with it, returning again and again to the space where mourning and anger overlap. Rather than framing the 2010 mining disaster as a singular tragedy with a singular emotional arc, director Robert Sarkies and writer Fiona Samuel treat it as an ongoing open wound, one that reshapes lives not through shock, but through attrition. The film’s power comes from its refusal to simplify that process.

At its center are two women who didn’t know each other before the disaster and never asked to become symbols of this tragedy or of the uprising that followed. Melanie Lynskey’s Anna Osborne and Robyn Malcolm’s Sonya Rockhouse are introduced as ordinary people living grounded lives. The film takes care to establish that normality early, not as a contrast for later heroics, but as the emotional baseline that makes everything that follows feel earned rather than engineered.

Lynskey delivers one of her most restrained performances to date, built around containment rather than collapse. Anna’s grief is internalized, complicated by responsibility to her children and a gnawing sense that acceptance would feel like betrayal. Lynskey plays this not as stoicism, but as exhaustion sharpened into focus. Her performance never asks for sympathy; it assumes the audience will understand the cost of holding yourself together when the world keeps asking you to move on.

Robyn Malcolm provides the film’s equilibrium. Where Anna processes all of this inward, Sonya externalizes, with her anger more visible and her frustration closer to the surface. Malcolm’s performance is bracing without tipping into eruption. She brings humor, impatience, and stubborn resolve to a character who could easily have been flattened into righteous outrage. Instead, Sonya feels alive, volatile, and deeply human.

The relationship between these two women becomes the film's emotional core. PIKE RIVER understands that friendship forged through shared loss doesn’t follow a neat, predictable narrative. Their bond develops through arguments, dark humor, and mutual refusal to let the other retreat into isolation. The film frames this connection not as inspiration, but as survival. Without each other, neither would last the years-long fight that follows.

Structurally, the film deliberately moves beyond the immediate aftermath of the disaster to focus on the long road toward accountability. Courtrooms, meetings, and procedural delays dominate the middle stretch, emphasizing how systems wear people down rather than confront wrongdoing directly. This approach may test the patience of viewers expecting traditional courtroom catharsis, but it’s essential to the film’s integrity. The exhaustion becomes the point. I think this was one of the best decisions that the team made. The focus could have easily been on the disaster alone; instead, we get a picture of a community and its evolution.

Lucy Lawless enters the story as a pivotal supporting presence, portraying a union leader who understands how power operates and how rarely it answers without pull. Lawless brings an authority to the role, never overpowering the central relationship but reinforcing the reality that change often requires institutional pressure layered on personal persistence. Her performance avoids mythologizing, keeping the focus on action rather than iconography.

Sarkies opts for a grounded, classical approach. The landscapes of New Zealand’s West Coast are captured with a heavy stillness, reflecting both beauty and burden. The cinematography avoids sensationalism, especially in scenes set in the mine itself. Instead of spectacle, the film leans into absence, distant hills, and spaces that feel permanently unresolved. That restraint mirrors the emotional experience of the families themselves.

In the end, the narrative moves quickly through political developments that, while historically significant, feel compressed compared to the careful pacing that precedes them. Some viewers may feel the film edges too close to affirmation in its closing moments. Even here, PIKE RIVER resists an easy closure. The sense of justice achieved is partial at best, underscored by what remains undone. What ultimately elevates PIKE RIVER is its clarity of purpose. This isn’t a film about villains or heroes. It’s about ordinary people discovering they can’t live with silence. It’s about the slow realization that grief, left unattended, becomes corrosive, and that action, however exhausting, is sometimes the only way forward.

PIKE RIVER honors its real-life subjects not by wrapping up their story into pure inspiration, but by allowing contradiction, frustration, and fatigue to remain visible. It trusts its audience to sit with discomfort and understand that perseverance rarely looks cinematic while it’s happening. By the time the film ends, what lingers isn’t just triumph, but respect. Respect for endurance. Respect for solidarity. And respect for the strength it takes to keep going when the world would prefer you stop asking questions.

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[photo courtesy of BRAINSTORM MEDIA]

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