Books editor Claire Mabey reviews The House Within, a new documentary about writer Dame Fiona Kidman which is premiering at the New Zealand International Film Festival 2024. Warning: slight spoiler alert.

When a person comes with the prefix of Dame it can be hard to truly see beyond the title, which demands the kind of respect that is prone to skimming rather than delving. The House Within is filmmaker Joshua Prendeville’s beautifully crafted attempt to go behind the sparkle that is so often in Dame Fiona Kidman’s eyes and down the passageways of memory to discover who and what helped shape the acclaimed and widely beloved writer. 

The film opens with the weather. A melancholy night setting is accompanied by the soundtrack of a vicious Wellington wind: the kind that slaps and moans around the houses that cling to the hillsides and speckle the shadow of land with their lights. Much of the documentary takes place at Dame Fiona Kidman’s house: a sort of classic capital villa with vertiginous concrete steps with strips of white paint on their edges, and wide windows that overlook the harbour and its big wind and changeable waters. The steps, and the emptiness of the house, haunt the film until the end when we discover why. 

From that hilltop home Kidman’s voice travels back through time and place to her beginnings. Throughout the film Prendeville makes wise use of Kidman’s own writings to articulate her preoccupations: early family, women’s attempts at elbowing their way into the life they desire, work, and family again. The beginning was, for Kidman, a troubling one. The opening voiceover is a startling reading (including the line “the faint apple cider scent of his spunk in my parents’ bed”) from The House Within, about a child imagining their father. We then learn about Kidman’s own father who, after returning from the war, was a changed and changeable man. “I had an intense relationship with my mother,” says Kidman over shots of her riding solo in a train carriage that whizzes through a grassy, distinctly agrarian Aotearoa landscape. “When I was a baby I was sickly and sent to Karitane hospital for months and she wasn’t allowed to see me. When I got back she became protective of me.” 

The intensity of this discomfort – of tensions between the family unit, of the seemingly heartless separation of mother and baby – is emphasised by aching cello music that plays over old photographs of Kidman’s parents, and contemporary domestic scenes: washing hanging on the line, and Kidman making up a bed with a stunning quilt that I want to know more about. The effect is one of a slow unravelling: of Prendeville coaxing out the threads of Kidman’s story, keeping a close and tidy stitch to the theme of “the house” which is symbolic of the central concerns of Kidman’s artistic worlds – the restricted lives of women and the subversion that erupts because of it; the “brutalisation” of men; and the scars of societal injustice. 

The title of the film comes from a Kidman novel of the same name, published in 2016, which follows 25 years in the life of Bethany Dixon. Towards the end of the documentary Kidman says of Marguerite Duras (a writer who Kidman adores, and who writes movingly about in her excellent essay collection So Far, For Now) that while Duras was able to lay herself open and expose what was beneath, Kidman herself could only do this “through the transformative art of fiction”. 

It’s a logical statement to those who know Kidman’s work but an incongruous one given the nature of the film: a documentary that focusses so acutely on Kidman the person. The writer is alone in every shot, sifting through photographs, moving through the spaces of her home, making Greek salad for lunch and setting the table, or travelling on an empty train. Nevertheless it is a reminder that Kidman’s life – at least in the eyes of the public – has been defined by fiction. Her novels have been celebrated in New Zealand and overseas for their depictions of complex characters, both men and women, and the trials that come when society is weighted against the working class, and the immigrant, and the unwed woman, and the mother, and the children of those people. But then Kidman says “to have an interior life we must live in the world”. 

The documentary alights on Kidman’s working life after leaving school at 15: odd jobs, like selling car and tractor parts, and waitressing, before she became a librarian and found happiness in work, as well as Chekhov, who “changed my life really.” She was happy. “But to be really happy in those days a woman had to have a white wedding,” Kidman smiles. When Kidman met Ian she was only 19 and within months they married (she laughs that she was worried she might soon be on the shelf). When Kidman got pregnant she had to leave the boys’ school she was working for as a librarian because with her husband there too “the evidence of the crime” was too obvious for the sensibilities of the day. 

Kidman chuckles through her recollections of those prudish, conservative ages that she lived through. The levity of these moments of twinkle in the documentary are light playing across the more turbulent waters of a life. We get more of the Kidman mischief towards the end when she describes how she and Ian broke into the house they liked up the road and had a merry time there getting acquainted with it (she later went to the real estate agent and said they’d pay more than the current offer: “It was BS! We had no money!” It all works out with a storybook plot).

The House Within glances at Kidman’s steel. The documentary doesn’t go into any area of the writer’s life in any depth, rather it plays across the surface, plunging briefly down before moving onto another patch. This does leave us wanting more, at times: there’s a moment when Kidman mentions that her mother took her to meet the man who she was to learn was her father. The name Gerald is mentioned (who is not Hugh, the war veteran). Perhaps this is a reading from the novel but I wanted to hear more about this, and more about Kidman’s writing around family and her work for the literary community. Having said this, the beads of insight that Prendeville has chosen to string from 12 hours of conversation are glittering. 

We learn that when Kidman was six she was hospitalised (we aren’t told why). When a nurse discovered she couldn’t read she said “well we’ll have to teach you this afternoon”. And she did. Kidman picked it up with extraordinary speed, so much so that the nurse returned to teach her how to write so that Kidman could send letters to her parents and beg them to come and get her. “A couple of days later my parents arrived and took me home. That’s when I learned that writing worked.”

One of the most in-depth storylines in the film is the story behind Kidman’s 1987 novel The Book of Secrets, which got her cast out from the community of Waipu where Kidman lived for a period as a teenager and where she found the inspiration for her book. 

The Book of Secrets was inspired by a woman colloquially known as The Witch of Waipu. Kidman described how she’d pass the woman’s house every day on her walk to Waipu District High School and would catch glimpses of the black clothes and the long hair: the figure haunted Kidman until she decided to write a story for her. The novel has never been out of print, but Kidman explains that she got it wrong. “I [unwittingly] transplanted one woman’s life onto another… I could have done better.” The Waipu community loathed the book and Kidman for over 20 years until, Kidman explains, a younger generation staged a reconciliation event. “There was a marquee on the hillside and lambs spit roasted on the beach that they carried up.” Kidman said she’d thought long and hard about what she’d ever say to the community. When the time came she talked about the role of fiction, and said that while it was she who was the witch of Waipu, a piece of her heart was in the place and she hoped that if they found it they wouldn’t give it back. “And they clapped and they roared. It was a turning point in my life.” 

It is extraordinary to think of a novel landing so catastrophically: many a writer’s fear. It is a moment of exposure for the writer and the woman, a Duras-esque vulnerability. The fact that Kidman kept going, that she learned and persisted, is another flash of that mettle – the same stuff that enabled her to grasp reading and writing so quickly out of necessity, that helped her break into house, that spurred her to set up a writers’ residency, and blaze a woman’s path within a sometimes aggressively male landscape and complete so many brilliant books. “I think I have a ruthless streak which, by and large, I manage to keep under wraps, except when I write,” she said in an interview on ANZL.  

After seeing The House Within I wouldn’t say Kidman displays ruthlessness, but a wily tendency to subvert expectations. Kidman also talks about anger. How the world of her earlier life was defined by the suppression of emotions: her war-traumatised father’s teaching that it was never OK to cry in public (even if you have been stood up by the boy you fancy), and the frustrating restrictions placed around women by class, by patriarchy, by colonisers and their religions. What is made clear in the film is that Kidman has had to go inwards from a very early age and find resource and inspiration there: in her own self, her own thoughts and instincts. 

The final scenes in the film are breathtaking, heartbreaking, bittersweet: Kidman standing on her stairs, and sitting in her darkened lounge with that view across the night-sparkling Wellington harbour while she tries to read from her own work that describes the death of her husband. More of that steel, much of that humanity. 

The House Within is a glittering feature length portrait of a remarkable person. It is a treatment we’ve long needed for one of our great writers and waymakers. I hope there will be more. 

The House Within, directed by Joshua Prendeville, screens on August 3 and August 5 in Wellington at the NZ International Film Festival; and in Auckland on 18 August; and Christchurch on 26, 27 and 31 August.