Bookworm had its world première opening Fantasia 2024, 18 July.
The title of Ant Timpson’s latest feature is explained within the opening five minutes. “I’m a card-carrying bookworm,” 11-year-old Mildred (Nell Fisher) says to her mother Zo (Morgana O’Reilly), “so yes, I sure do know a crap tonne of words.” Mildred is loquacious, precocious, perhaps even wise beyond her years, although her knowledge of the world is decidedly bookish, based more in meticulously researched theory than in any actual practice. Mildred has finally persuaded the loving but overworked Zo to take her on a real camping trip, where the pre-teen hopes to capture on film the legendary Canterbury panther, and reap the much-needed monetary reward for proof of its existence – yet on the eve of their expedition, a freak accident leaves Zo hospitalised in a coma.
This is where Strawn Wise (Elijah Wood) steps in – a failed illusionist and Mildred’s long lost father from the United States who, desperate to find a way to bond with the daughter he has never known, reluctantly agrees to join her on the quest, despite his total inexperience, practical or even theoretical, in camping, and his more general cravenness. Yet as this odd couple goes adventuring, and as the narrowness of Mildred’s home life broadens in the great outdoors (a transition marked by a shift from squared-off Academy ratio to widescreen), both father and daughter will discover hidden talents and common ground, even as they face more than one kind of predator.
Co-written with Toby Harvard, Bookworm is not just Timpson’s follow-up to Come to Daddy (2019), but also forms with it a complementary diptych. After all, both films have a character played by Wood coming from America to New Zealand, a stranger in a strange land, to rekindle a broken father-child relationship, even if in Timpson’s feature debut Wood played the estranged grown-up son, whereas here he is the errant father – and both films let Michael Smiley chew up an eccentric if menacing cameo. Yet the differences are also striking. Where Come to Daddy was a darkly comic, very adult tale of simple men, toxic masculinity and bad dads, this is more a family picture in every sense, as Strawn makes every effort to become a good dad, and despite some life-or-death obstacles and cliff’s-edge suspense, reconciliation is clearly on the map.
Indeed, despite some black humour, and a funny form of family reunion at the end, Bookworm is a good-natured film that indeed would not be inappropriate viewing for someone of Mildred’s age. Indeed its closest analogue is Taika Waititi’s Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016), which besides having a similar tone, also features a precocious bookworm going on an outdoors adventure with a father figure and finding a cryptid. And despite Strawn’s fish-out-of-water disorientation in these wide, sweeping landscapes, he is only retreading the footsteps of Wood’s Frodo in Lord of the Rings, also shot in New Zealand. Meanwhile, as played by Wood and Fisher, father and daughter carry the film with their winning, albeit fractious, rapport, as they grow together on their journey and find that they unexpectedly share certain genetic traits. Charm is key here, as well, in keeping with Strawn’s profession, as a certain magic. It is a lovely rejoinder to Timpson’s bleaker previous title.
