Sundance review: 'A New Kind of Wilderness' is a moving look at a family adjusting to a new life, without the wife/mother who was its center

A gentle movie with a roaring heart, the Norwegian documentary “A New Kind of Wilderness” shows a family in the middle of the hardest transition imaginable: The loss of a wife and mother.

Director Silje Evensmo Jacobsen starts with the hard reality: The death of Maria Gros Vatne, from cancer, at age 41. Maria was a photographer and blogger, who bought a farm in Norway that she and her English husband, Nik Payne, rebuilt and brought to life. They also raised and homeschooled four kids — the oldest, Ronja, from Maria’s earlier relationship, and the younger ones: Freja, Falk and Ulv (aka Wolfie) — in harmony with nature.

As the movie begins, Nik and the kids are dealing with the emotional and practical aspects of Maria’s absence. The practical one is that Maria’s photography brought in the majority of the family’s income, and without that Nik can’t make the payments on the farm. So Nik has to decide to sell he farm, relocate the kids and, for the first time in their lives, enroll them in school.

While Nik works to get the three younger kids settled in their new house, teenage Ronja has moved back in with her father — and is seeing a therapist to cope with the grief from her mother’s death. Part of that grief translates into guilt that it’s too painful to talk about Maria with her sister, Freja (who we see from 10 to, I’d guess, 13 in this film), who needs her big sister now more than ever.

Nik is working through a different kind of guilt: The worry that he’s betraying Maria’s memory, by not being able to raise the kids in nature, on the farm, as she always dreamed. That guilt grows deeper when he contemplates uprooting the kids and moving back to England.

Jacobsen gets her camera into the middle of the Payne family’s lives, capturing tiny moments that carry great emotional weight. Her footage is matched beautifully by the occasional flashbacks, taken from Maria’s home videos of her kids when they were younger. As seamlessly edited by Kristian Tveit and Christoffer Heie, “A New Kind of Wilderness” becomes a moving journey through the Payne family’s grief, love and resilience.

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‘A New Kind of Wilderness’

★★★1/2

Screening in the World Cinema Documentary competition of the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. Not rated, but probably PG-13 for thematic material and the slaughtering of a cow. Running time: 84 minutes; in English and Norwegian, with subtitles.

Screens again: Thursday, January 25, 10:30 a.m., Holiday Village Cinemas 1, Park City; Friday, January 26, 2 p.m., Redstone Cinemas 1, Park City. Also available online via the Sundance portal, Thursday-Sunday, January 25-28.