In addition to being the leading auteur working in the Inuktitut language, director Zacharias Kunuk has been a standard bearer for Indigenous cinema more generally for decades. He made a big splash internationally with his epic 2001 debut, Atanarjuat, aka The Fast Runner, and while some viewers were a bit confounded by Kunuk’s meandering narrative style (adapted from classic Inuit folktales), others admired the film for its expansiveness, in both storytelling and visual style. Kunuk’s widescreen compositions tend to cast human figures against the flat tundra, the horizon splitting the frame in half in a way that engages with minimalism but is in fact replete with activity and natural features.
Two of the director’s more recent films were also generally impressive: Searchers (2016), an Arctic riff on the John Ford classic, and 2019’s One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk, Kunuk’s most overtly political tale, about a man who is forced by the Canadian government to move to a reservation, giving up his traditions for enforced modernity. No one else is telling these stories the way Kunuk does, and in his films one gets a true sense that he is often bending, if not reinventing, the cinematic apparatus in order to convey these ordinary yet mythic tales in stark visual form.
As an admirer of Kunuk, then, it gives this writer no pleasure to say that his latest project, Wrong Husband (or Uᐃᒃᓴᕆᖖᒋᑕᕋ, in Inuktitut), doesn’t really work. It’s a combination of a number of Inuit folkloric themes into a single narrative, but oddly, these elements neither cohere into a linear story form, nor do they transcend the everyday to achieve the mythic. The main plot concerns a pair of young lovers, Kaujak (Theresia Kappianaq) and Sapa (Haiden Agutimarek), who were betrothed to one another from childhood. When Kaujak’s father dies suddenly, she and her mother Nujatut (Leah Panimera) are sent by the elder tribesmen to live with another clan. The mom is quickly married off to Makpa (Mark Taqqaugaq), a man referred to as “wifeless friend.” This all happens while Sapa is away on a hunt, and so Kaujak is essentially bartered to the neighboring tribe as a matrimonial chit.
There are supernatural elements, such as the frequent appearance of an ancestor (Karen Ivalu), called Fog Lady in the credits, who intervenes in various affairs. And for some unknown reason, there is a fellow in a grotesque latex costume who crawls out of the water and threatens to menace the various characters. He is the Troll, and despite his frequent appearance, nothing he does impinges on the marriage plot whatsoever. It’s as if Kunuk just had the costume and thought it was cool.
As with all of Kunuk’s films, the cinematography is exceptional. In many respects, Wrong Husband is a landscape film, with the barest traces of human conflict imposed on the rugged imagery. In fact, for this writer it even recalls Michael Snow’s La Région Centrale, since it often resembles the land and sky that Snow’s film transforms into an abstract tilt-a-whirl. And it’s to Wrong Husband‘s credit that, despite its overt depiction of a patriarchal order, the film is primarily concerned with women’s subjectivity and their conflicted emotional lives. Nevertheless, one gets the sense that Kunuk put his faith here, as he had previously, in the inherent cinematic potential of traditional Inuit myth, but this time it didn’t pan out.
Additionally, after the modern narrative and sociological incisiveness of Noah Piugattuk, Wrong Husband is even more of a disappointment. This story, taking place in 2000 BCE, is a film made by and for Inuit audiences, but for the first time, Kunuk’s focus on tradition and mythology begin to feel like a form of avoidance, a sort of fetish for the distant past that unintentionally places this present-day community into an ideological past. As we know from the history of ethnography, and from foundational films like Flaherty’s Nanook of the North that recreate old ways instead of engaging with new ones, there is a reactionary tendency for Western subjects to perceive other cultures as part of an anthropological past. And while it would never be right to suggest that Kunuk tailor his film work to avoid the worst possible interpretations, it nevertheless feels like Wrong Husband reflects a creative dead end.
Published as part of TIFF 2025 — Dispatch 1.
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