‘Prime Minister’ Review: An Up-Close-and-Personal Peek Into Jacinda Arden’s Six-Year Term Shows What Thoughtful Leadership Can Look Like
A down-to-earth, compassionate woman who’s spent her entire life building a career in public service is suddenly thrust into the leadership role of her party after the previous occupant is forced to step aside due to bad polling. Oh, and she only has a few weeks to turn things around before the entire country votes on whether or not they want her to assume the top office in the land. Sound familiar?
With “Prime Minister,” filmmakers Michelle Walshe and Lindsey Utz present a compelling what-if to Americans now dealing with another four years under a ruthless tyrant by showcasing the capable leadership and everyday life of former New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern during her six-year term, as well as where she is today post-resignation. The documentary acts as an intimate study of what it means to serve others when it seems like the world is falling apart and to be a partner and mother at the same time. Despite the challenges both present, Ardern’s deft and humane handling of crises reminds us that government can be a force for good, but only so long as we let it be.
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“We have to rehumanize one another again” Ardern tells her students at Harvard University at the beginning of the film. We first meet Ardern in 2024, outside of her home country and relocated to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she’s working on a dual fellowship in both public leadership and online extremism — but also having time to walk her daughter, Neve, to the school bus in the morning. This dichotomy — of trying to be a force for good on both a grand and personal scale — persists throughout “Prime Minister” as we flash back to 2017, when Ardern took to the political stage two months before the election and newly pregnant. She didn’t have the time to think or panic. Her only option was to act and while she may have felt like she wasn’t totally ready to do so, we’re told the “imposter syndrome” that took root during her teenage years had built in her the exact strength and confidence needed to face all the doubters and skeptics that stood between Adern doing what she felt was right by her country.
This time in Ardern’s life has been carefully documented not only via footage shot by her partner and eventual husband, NZ broadcaster Clarke Gayford, and others, but also audio interviews conducted by the National Library of New Zealand’s Political Diary Oral History Project. As Ardern listens to these recordings in the present day while she writes and reflects on her experiences as PM, she takes an analytical approach to each moment, inspecting not only the words she’s saying, but also recalling the emotional state she was in at the time they were given. In doing so, she offers both reflection and a comprehensive guide on how to steer a nation through times of great tragedy and suffering.
“Tell people what you know, even if it’s hard.”
“People shouldn’t have to thank you for a humane response”
“Your job is to govern for everybody.”
These Jacinda-isms start to stack up as she faces one devastating event after another, yet at every point, we come to find these aren’t just words to her, but deeply felt mantras. When the mass shooting at a mosque in Christchurch places a global spotlight on New Zealand and its gun laws, rather than shirk from the conversation or work to move past these traumas as we often do in America, Ardern finds a form of action she can take to ensure that massacres such as this never occur again. Less than a month after the attack, she passed a law that banned most semiautomatic weapons, assault rifles, and higher capacity magazines, as well as parts used to convert guns into semiautomatic weapons. As far as we can tell, this law worked, as archival news clips show New Zealanders returning weapons through a buyback program installed as part of the law and those weapons ultimately destroyed as a result. When the COVID-19 virus swept across the world, prompting most leaders to either freeze in terror or find ways to put profit above people, Ardern was one of the first to close her country’s borders and enact strict lockdown procedures, a choice that allowed New Zealand to be one of the few countries to isolate the spread.
Ardern makes clear that one of the only factors of relevance to her in coming to this decision was preventing widespread death. Any argument that ran in contrast to this, whether it be for economic or societal reasonings, proved secondary. In the end, it’s estimated her steps, drastic as they may have been, potentially saved as many as 80,000 lives and made it so New Zealand could re-open safely long before most other countries were able to. However, with new strains breaking out and lockdowns needing to be reinstated, Ardern quickly became a target of fringe groups like anti-vaxxers and far-right conspiracy theorists importing Trump’s hatred to the other side of the world. After Ardern’s landslide re-election that saw her Labour Party gain the first majority government since introduction of a proportional representation system in 1996, her dissenters felt emboldened to take to the streets, forming a protest camp outside of the Parliament building that was not too dissimilar from the attempted American insurrection on January 6, 2021.
While all of this is going on, Ardern is also trying to incorporate the raising of her daughter into the lifestyle of a global leader, a task she has to redefine almost immediately upon realizing the stress of the job will physically prevent her from breast-feeding. As Neve grows up playing in parliamentary offices and watching her mother on TV with no comprehension of the burdens she’s shouldering, it’s evident the impact of Ardern on her daughter during these years is mainly in shaping her independence, a fact she ultimately discerns in her resignation speech before Parliament. This ties back to one of the first things you start to notice about Ardern; Her sense of humor. She’s always ready with a joke or a demonstration of wit, willing to laugh at herself and others in need of a bit of levity, but by the time the hateful rhetoric reaches her doorstep, that bubbly, yet sharp personality has given way to an exhausted individual ready to put herself and her family first.
Ultimately, “Prime Minister” feels like a film that would’ve had more impact if released a year ago, but today reads as a tragic depiction of yet another experienced, thoughtful woman whose determination to do good, both by her family and the country she represents, is steam-rolled by the horror and bigotry other individuals wish to bring on the world. Ardern ends up relying on force to push out the protesters and in doing so realizes that she can no longer keep the country together as a leader must do. Though it’s not featured as part of the narrative, in resigning as PM, Ardern opened the door for Labour to suffer a landslide defeat in the next election, marring her own legacy for the sake of her mental health and as a response to those who stood in opposition to her. As she packs her office sporting a Portishead t-shirt and reveling in the presence of her now fiancé and their daughter, we can see her joy slowly start to flow back in, forcing us to wonder if any good person can actually govern in a world where politics have become seemingly ruled by those who are loudest and most out for themselves.
Throughout the film, Ardern likens her experience at the helm of New Zealand’s ship to explorer Ernest Shakleton’s Antarctic voyage, a failed mission that was still considered a success based on every member of the crew surviving the journey. Maintaining confidence and bringing the team together under tenuous circumstances was a task Ardern seemed made for, but in stepping away, she reveals that with some missions, you can only go so far.
“How do we shine a light on the humanity that I know is still there” she asks herself and others watching this documentary in present day, fully aware that there are still greater battles to be fought despite our woeful inability to work as a collective. What unfortunately goes unsaid is that we need progressive leaders like her who push us in the right direction even if we’re not ready to go there ourselves and as much as she may love her home country, choosing to leave it after what she went through does point to politics and governance on a global scale as a system that will always go through swings of progression and regression. Based on her efforts now, trying to both train the next generation and stem the tide of rising fascism online, we’re left with the feeling that the best Ardern can do is pass it off, as it has been before, hoping that someday, someone else will come along to do their bit of good in the arena before the lions tear them apart. It’s not exactly a bright message, but better than giving up entirely, and necessary considering her daughter will soon have to face these challenges in her own way as well.
Grade: B
“Prime Minister” premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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