Night Raiders

  Finally, “Canadian apocalypse” is no longer a contradiction in terms. 

Legendarily “nice” Canadians at last have a narrative feature film that exposes our  dystopian present. 

More specifically, it pretends to a near-term dystopian future that amplifies our really dystopian past. 

The specific target is the cultural genocide that the Canadian federal government, abetted by the Catholic church, attempted upon our indigenous population. That is a real horror, for which the native Canadians continue to pay, while the church finds devious ways not to. 

The government spews promises and backtracks. The Prime Minister declared a National Reconciliation Day, then for that event spurned native invitations, opting for a family holiday in the mountains instead.

In writer-director Ms Danis Goulet’s effective thriller, an impersonal police state separates native children from their parents and weaponizes them to keep order. 

But here native mythology triumphs over high-tech weaponry. A battalion of precision-firing drones turn into a horde of mosquitoes that serve the heroine’s daughter’s will. Thus the native elder’s opening vision triumphs over the supposedly superior white man’s science.

Wishful though the end might be, the film presents a fair extrapolation of Canada’s First Nations’ experience. At least the persecution part, the attempted genocide. The central mother/daughter relationship wins out, in contrast to another one, in which a woman’s son has been brainwashed to the point of killing her. 

The natives initially thought their predicted saviour “from the North” was the mother. When it turns out to be the daughter instead, the film tacitly places its faith in the future generations to campaign for and to achieve a justice and humanity so far denied them. Broadening the context, a distant cry of "I can't breathe" evokes the George Floyd incident.

The film has been wildly misrepresented. It lacks the imaginary projected science to qualify as “sci fi” and the supernatural to be a “horror.” Basically, it’s an impassioned First Nations political film disguised as thriller. If it heartens and mobilizes the First Nations it will have worked. 

Ironically, many Canadian small-L liberals who are rightly infuriated by the Canadian government’s abuse of its native children have no problem avidly supporting the Palestinians even as they make their own pre-teen children soldiers, shields, martyrs, confident that the world will blame Israel for their deaths. The Left does. 

Even as the Palestinians set random fire to Israeli forests Canada’s Green Party almost broke up in its eagerness to support them. Politics is rarely rational on either side.