Hunt for the Wilderpeople is a movie full of what they used to call "heart". They still do, I guess, but in general I don't know that "heart" is in terribly high regard these days. Generally speaking, movies that are long on heart tend to also be mildly awful, is the thing, and this is the trap that Hunt for the Wilderpeople ably avoids. It is, in fact, a superb movie, a splendidly morbid comedy for the whole family that applies an arch, deadpan sense of humor to everything it can get its hands on. But does it with a real thick, unapologetic streak of sentimentality, culminating in a final scene that's just so goddamn nice. This is such a paean to familial love and the joy of discovering where you fit in that Frank Capra himself couldn't have come up with a more cynicism-free take on the same scenario, though Capra's version of this film wouldn't likely have included a shot of the nicest, loveliest, friendliest character beaming with enthusiasm as her face drips blood from the wild boar she just killed with a hunting knife. So that's the territory we're living in, anyway.

The plot, based on Barry Crump's 1986 novel Wild Pork and Watercress (loosely, I suspect; the form Hunt for the Wilderpeople takes relies to some irreducible extent on the media and pop culture landscape of the 21st Century), involves a 12-year-old boy named Ricky Baker (Julian Dennison), a gangsta rap idolator who has been shuttling from foster home to foster home all throughout New Zealand, and has finally reached his last chance at a farmhouse almost all the way into the bush: if he can't make it under the guardianship of the giving, gregarious Bella (Rima Te Wiata) and her sullen, craggy husband Hector (Sam Neill), he's going to end up sent to a group home to painfully eke his way to adulthood, or just as likely die trying. And Bella, at least, turns out to be a phenomenal influence, the kind of person who is so fucking cheery that you start to feel like it's your fault for not living up to their energetically optimistic expectations of what you can achieve. So Ricky lives up to Bella's expectations, and thrives under her charmingly manic way of inhabiting the world, which includes everything from boar-slaughtering to an adorably corny custom-made birthday song for Ricky on his 13th birthday. Ricky loves Bella, Hec loves Bella, we love Bella, and Te Wiata's performance is impossibly warm and magnetic, particularly in contrast to the inarticulate Ricky and the growling, stone-faced Hec. So we're just as sad as they are when Bella dies.

This happens very early and very painlessly, and it's at this point that Hunt for the Wilderpeople transforms from what was already a deeply agreeable and thoroughly hilarious comedy into one of 2016's standout movies. Ricky tries to run away, Hec finds him with very little effort (Hec, we are told and see demonstrated, is a peerless survivalist), and while trying to punch the boy for being a sarcastic little asshole, Hec snaps his ankle. There's nothing to do but spend the next several weeks living as best as they can, and they emerge to find that the child welfare services, under the guidance of Ricky's overly-alarmist case worker Paula (Rachel House), have decided that Hec, distraught with grief, kidnapped the boy and has been doing God knows what to him in the bush. There's not much for it other than for the pair to head back into the wild, spending the next several months dodging Paula's attempts to track them down, while, naturally enough, bonding and forming a father/son relationship.

This is all enormously fascinating in the execution: Hunt for the Wilderpeople is addicted to ellipsis, burying long passages of time in the space of a single cut and a thick layer of implication. It's in part, I suspect, because of the way that the film explicitly positions itself as a fairy tale or bedtime story, with several short chapters breaking up the action, and an otherworldly, Philip Glass-ish chorale piece on the soundtrack that opens the film immediately into a mood of meditative quasi-mythological abstraction. It's also, in part, to turn the developing relationship between man and boy into a series of emotional impressions rather than a leaden tour of the key moments that make them like each other. By leaving us with the feeling that we're occasionally dropping in to see Ricky and Hec in the bush, rather than crafting the illusion that we're living their lives with them, the film can sketch out their shared arc more swiftly, allowing it to get more done than just develop the two of them. It ends up being a lovely realtionship, too: rather more prickly and sarcastic than Bella probably would have wanted, but it's sweet anyway, and grows organically and easily from the content, and it has a rightness to it that the great majority of similar tales of social misfits forming a family unit never come close to achieving.

Let me not misrepresent the thing: tender-hearted though it is, Hunt for the Wilderpeople is first and foremost a comedy written and directed by Taika Waititi, who to date is probably best-known for the bone-dry vampire mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows. That's a great comedy, one of the funniest U.S. releases from 2015, and a generally peerless application of a concept that could have gone very poorly; Hunt for the Wilderpeople is better than it across the board, but not because it jettisons everything Waititi did there. The approach to how to stage comedy is very much the same: let the actors deliver their lines a little flatter than they need to, reside in the strangest moments long enough that their strangeness starts to vanish (the birthday song, which drifts from lightly mocking Bella's rural lack of sophistication to celebrating her ability to have fun and show Ricky how much she cares for him, is a clear example), let Rhys Darby do that wonderful thing of his where he delivers lines with an impatient questioning tone, as though he's trying to catch himself in a logical fallacy. Really, it's a strategy of letting very weird situations settle into a place that they seem completely normal, leading to something almost like a Kafka-esque tone of mundane absurdity. I'm frankly not sure why it works so well, but it absolutely does: the film's ability to pause in its tracks for some weird digressive loop - a confusing theological metaphor involving a room full of snacks, Paula's one-track tendency to think of her job in terms of American action movies, multiple pseudo-epic action sequences - and then simply resume its imprortant business of watching Ricky and Hec interact is miraculous and damned impressive.

The film gets tremendous mileage from its cast: I would not want to see this without Neill's outstanding work as someone who genuinely dislikes children (rather than movie-dislikes them), coming up with an impressive catalogue of distressed, angry, repulsed reaction shots to his co-star, which adds the gravelly note that helps make this feel like a great sentimental film and not a cloying one; and House makes for an excellent comic villain. Plus, Dennison, is a great find, a kid who can match Neill reaction shot-for-reaction shot, and who's great at adopting a stone face for the many, many moments where the film simply needs him to inhabit a frame placidly, while the comedy derives more from the gangly timing than what happens per se.

Even so, and all credit where it's due to the actors the film is mostly Waititi's success. Anyone who has seen What We Do in the Shadows or the TV show Flight of the Conchords, where he cut his teeth on a few episodes, knows roughly to expect from the director at this point (and if you haven't seen those things, it's very much worth your time to do so). The pacing is acutely slow; many of the jokes are about people having the not-quite-articulate sense that they've just encountered something ridiculous and don't know how to respond to it; there are pop culture references that aren't terribly obscure, but so unintuitive in the moment that they seem fresh and even daring; line deliveries tend to savor the structure of sentences rather than the meaning. The difference is that Hunt for the Wilderpeople takes that magnificent sense for how to make offbeat, low-key comedy, and hides a sweet emotional narrative inside the weirdness. So you get the best of both worlds: acerbic comedy style and unabashedly sincere storytelling and old-fashioned themes. Add in the chronologically expansive way that the loose and flowing narrative is structured, and the relaxed mood it lends the film - add in, too, the gorgeous natural lighting of Lachlan Milne's cinematography, and the pronounced shift in colors from chilly greys to warm greens - and we have here one of the great unassuming triumphs of the year.