We Were Dangerous

In 1954, Māori teenage girl Nellie is sent by her family to Christchurch to live with a relative after her hometown’s meatworks closes down. Unable to find her relative, Nellie befriends another female Māori teenager named Daisy, who has escaped several foster homes after experiencing abuse. After being arrested for shoplifting, the two girls are sent to the Te Motu School for Incorrigible and Delinquent Girls. The Matron, a devout Māori woman who had grown up in a Christian orphanage, attempts to reprogram the girls into subservient housewives and mothers. The Matron believes that the British brought Christianity to civilise the Māori people.

Nellie and Daisy attempt to escape the reform school with another girl named Pauline but are captured. At the advice of a government official, the Matron relocates the entire reform school to a former leper colony on a remote island. Nellie and Daisy are joined by the European teenager Lou, the daughter of a respected Christchurch doctor. Lou was sent to Te Motu after a father caught her having sex with her female mathematics tutor. The three girls are assigned to share a rickety hut and become friends.

On the island, the Matron continues her reprogramming efforts which are laced with Christian religious instruction, housework, and various chores. The Matron also suppresses Nellie and Daisy’s expression of Māori culture and punishes them for leading their peers in a rock and roll dance. Amidst the Matron’s authoritarian rule, the girls befriend the kindly Barry, the island groundskeeper who introduces them to a hut that was inhabited by a Chinese leper, who died on the island decades ago.

With the girls proving resistant to the Matron’s reprogramming efforts, she enlists the help of a doctor who performs forced sterilisation on two girls at a medical hut. Lou attempts to warn her father about the destructive surgeries but her letter is intercepted by the matron. Following the disappearances, Nellie and Daisy seek to escape the island but unexpectedly find themselves at odds with Lou, who is seemingly afraid to break the rules. Lou also appears to embrace the Matron’s Christian teachings and programme.

When Nellie stands up to the Matron for punishing Daisy for not being able to read, Lou slaps Nellie and punishes her by splashing with water. However, Lou’s apparent reformed behaviour is later revealed to be a ruse to distract the Matron while she, Nellie and Daisy plot to burn down the medical hut and gather supplies to build a raft to escape the island. Later that night, the trio set fire to the medical hut, destroying the operating theatre. While the Matron and other staff are preoccupied, the three girls escape the island on their improvised raft. The film ends with Nellie, Daisy and Lou sailing into the sunrise.

Last Updated: June 17, 2025 at 08:28