The Hollywood star takes one hell of beating in the South Island-shot Heart of the Beast. 

He suffers a heart attack. He survives a plane crash. He falls into rapids, smashes up his leg and nearly drowns – twice. He cracks bones back into place, makes splints on the fly and hobbles about with a branch as a makeshift walking stick. Pain management? That’s a bottle of Aspirin, pills ground up between his back teeth.

Brad Pitt’s new movie is a disaster. In flashback scenes, he is shot at, tear gassed and bombed. In one grisly moment, Pitt’s famous washboard abs – still intact at the age of 62 – are gnawed on during a night-time attack by wolves. This might be the first time you’ll want to look away when Pitt takes off his shirt. 

More often than not, New Zealand’s ferociously beautiful bush is to blame. Heart of the Beast, Pitt’s new wilderness survival epic, has Otago, Fiordland and Glenorchy standing in for the Alaskan wild. Pitt is here playing Special Forces veteran James Belmont, enjoying retirement and a laid-back lake-side retreat with his ex-combat dog Odin before everything goes horribly wrong.

Director David Ayer, who directed Pitt in 2014’s tank-based war movie Fury, starts this bush adventure slowly. Belmont and Odin share bacon by the fire for breakfast and fish for dinner. They cuddle together in a tent at night, and wake to the same nightmares of their war exploits. Pitt’s playing a stern, grizzled mute, but the pair have obvious chemistry.

Then a storm moves in, the movie takes flight, and Pitt gets beaten to an absolute pulp. Not in a fun way, like in Fight Club, or in a romantic way, like in Mr & Mrs Smith. Here he’s dismantled in a spiralling, dispiriting way. Considering the headlines around Pitt these days, you may enjoy this, and it sounds like filming Heart of the Beast took a real toll. “Brad was pretty much cold and miserable for most of the film,” Ayer told the Sydney Morning Herald.

But Pitt’s punishment is not the best thing about Heart of the Beast. The scenery. OMG. Just like Taika Waititi’s Hunt For the Wilderpeople and Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, Ayer puts Aotearoa’s lush bush centre stage. His camera swoops and soars over, around and through it. It ripples with dreamy light, and deep, dense greens. You might ooh. You’ll definitely ahh.

Then you’ll gasp. Because Heart of the Beast contains another Aotearoa element that eclipses how stunning the scenery is. Odin, a German Shepherd, is played by Uber, a local dog nursing a CGI prosthetic leg and a mouth of silver teeth. What happened to the guy who did that? When Belmont says, “I shot him in the head,” you believe him.

Uber acts his furry butt off. His eyes are alive, eager to please, big brown pools of companionship and heart-melting emotions you’ll want to dive into. He is a good dog, hitting his marks, nailing his lines, his whines and his howls. Don’t work with animals is what they say. Uber proves otherwise, his emotional range and stunt work eclipsing many human actors. Here, that often includes Pitt.

In the midday screening I attended, ushers passed out tissues at the door. I laughed and stuffed them in my pocket. I held out on opening them until the end. No spoilers – it was the beauty of Aotearoa’s bush that got to me, OK? Get me a down jacket and sign me up to a bivouac-building course, because we really do live in paradise.

Heart of the Beast (rated M) is in theatres now.