‘Prime Minister’ Review: New Zealand Leader Jacinda Ardern Works Through Crisis in an Intimate but Simplistic Documentary

Siddhant Adlakha

27 January 2025 at 7:30 pm·4-min read

World leaders have rarely been captured with as much intimacy as in Michelle Walshe and Lindsay Utz’s “Prime Minister.” While the duo — whose credits include “Chasing Great” and “American Factory” respectively — are its ultimate architects, the shape the movie takes is largely owed to Clarke Gayford, partner and eventual husband to the doc’s subject, former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Gayford’s proximity is a double-edged sword, one the rest of the production also wields, in terms of its limited political approach. However, as a portrait of struggles in the seat of power, the film presses all the right emotional buttons.

Ardern was the Prime Minister from 2017 to early 2023 — perhaps the most challenging premiership in New Zealand’s history. The films spans her entire term, plus a few months on either side as bookends, chronicling her tumultuous tenure through the Christchurch mosque shooting in 2019 and the COVID-19 pandemic. She was widely lauded for her handling of both crises, even though the latter would eventually draw the ire of conspiratorial backlash, and even violence.

More from Variety

This broad framework of recent global events provides the film with inherent peaks and valleys, enhancing moment-to-moment drama while revealing certain limitations. Some of these are structural. A volcanic eruption warrants inclusion as a catastrophe during Ardern’s term, but while it’s captured from an emotional standpoint through her empathetic eyes, there ends up being no political approach to this event (at least, none that we see). Other flaws are more overarching. By adhering to a highlight-reel approach, the nitty-gritties of lawmaking, and Ardern’s actual political positions, get lost in the shuffle.

However, Walshe and Utz complement the movie’s broad-strokes, big-stories approach with a more personal framing device. Glimpses of Ardern providing sit-down audio interviews to record her innermost thoughts further the notion of behind-the-scenes access, though much of this comes through Gayford meticulously filming moments from the couple’s private life, and the way Ardern is slowly forced to retreat from it as her national duties intensify.

Editors Grace Zahrah and Enat Sidi find a skillful balance between these home videos and footage of public appearances. The contrast between them highlights a widening chasm between the two halves of her lives. There’s Ardern, the graceful, good-humored leader, whose jovial nature and kindness-first approach is framed in sharp contrast to that of Donald Trump in the doc. And there’s Jacinda, the anxious, workaholic partner and mother, whose self-doubt often gets the best of her behind closed doors (at which point Gayford becomes a character too, conversing with her from behind the camera).

The film’s aesthetic approach may seem simple at the outset, but it makes deft use of century-old documentary footage in a way that enhances Ardern’s self-reflections. She mentions, in her interview voiceovers, a story of leadership her father once clung to, and which she now treats as her North Star: that of early-20th-century explorer Ernest Shackleton, whose ship, the Endurance, sank in the Antarctic in 1914, but who kept his crew alive for two years until their rescue. The film parallels Ardern’s term with footage from the ill-fated expedition, making obvious (though no less impactful) its themes of resilience. Only whereas Shackleton kept his crew together, Ardern’s shepherding of New Zealand through COVID-19 would eventually result in denialism to the point of protest and riot — a bitter irony she even notes.

However, when it comes time to wrap up the story of Ardern’s leadership, the film’s lack of political complexity proves detrimental. Ardern’s actual outlooks are usually skimmed past, or presented as broad ideological statements about social progress, with no mention of any of the financial policies (or tax promises un-kept) that would affect her approval beyond anti-vaccine fringe elements — a largely external factor framed as central to her resignation.

“Prime Minister” may verge on hagiographic in its telling, but as a tale of political mythmaking — and a young woman in an world of right-wing strongmen — it’s greatly assisted by its intimate documents of Ardern. Since these are captured by her closest confidant and biggest supporter, they come with all the flaws and flourishes that living in a leader’s proximity provides.

Best of Variety

The Best Albums of the Decade