Name: Holy Days
Director: Nathalie Boltt
Genre: Adventure, Comedy, Drama
Released: 2026-02-26T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 101 min
Cast: Judy Davis, Miriam Margolyes, Jacki Weaver, Elijah Tamati, Craig Hall

A battered car noses up a South Island road, tussock and mountain crowding the windows, and inside it sit three elderly nuns and a small boy who has just talked them into grand theft auto. That single image — habits held against the cold Canterbury light, a getaway vehicle piloted by women vowed to poverty and obedience — is the whole argument of Holy Days, the feature directing debut of Nathalie Boltt.

The situation the film dramatizes is a closure notice. A convent has dwindled to its last three sisters, developers want the land, and the one piece of paper that could save it, a title deed, waits somewhere at the far end of the country. Young Brian, who has found in these women the family the rest of his life withholds, becomes the engine of a plan that is equal parts heist and pilgrimage. The film treats faith less as doctrine than as obstinacy: the refusal to surrender a home simply because a ledger says you should.

The casting is the statement. Judy Davis, as Sister Agnes, brings the flint she has spent a career sharpening, a watchfulness that curdles sentiment before it can pool. Miriam Margolyes, as Sister Luke, supplies the film’s licensed anarchy, the octogenarian force who can make devotion sound like mischief. Jacki Weaver’s Sister Mary Clare rounds the trio with a softer gravity. Three Oscar-nominated players in wimples is not a gag; it is a wager that the road-comedy shell can hold real actors doing real work, and that an audience will follow nuns it actually believes in. The three do not read as a stunt trio so much as a study in how differently veteran performers can inhabit the same restraint: one sharp, one unruly, one quietly immovable. The film seems to trust their faces to carry stretches a script would otherwise have to explain.

Boltt comes to directing from the other side of the lens, after a long career in front of it, and Holy Days reads like the work of someone who has studied how comedy and grief share a single frame. She wrote the screenplay as well and takes a supporting role, which gives the film the intimacy of an author’s project along with the exposure of one. Her source is no obscurity at home: the story descends from Dame Joy Cowley, a New Zealand literary institution whose books have raised generations of readers, and part of the film’s quiet ambition is to carry that voice back onto local cinema screens. Adapting a national author is a particular kind of pressure, because the audience that loves the page arrives already knowing what the film owes it.

Shot around Christchurch, Akaroa and the Aoraki high country, the film hands the South Island a role as its fourth lead. The road movie is the oldest excuse in cinema to let landscape do the talking, and the wide, cold-bright New Zealand vistas lend the small human story a scale it could never build indoors. The production design leans into period texture: a convent that seems frozen a few decades back, a car that belongs to the same vanished moment. The eccentricity registers as lived-in atmosphere rather than costume-box whimsy. Boltt frames the mountains the way a painter frames a horizon: as the thing the small figures are measured against.

What the premise does not resolve is whether charm can survive contact with sentiment. Nuns-on-the-run is a genre with a strong gravitational pull toward the twee, and a story about rescuing a beloved home from faceless developers hands a filmmaker every easy button to press. The pleasures on the table — three formidable actors, a gorgeous country, a plucky child — are also the exact ingredients of a film that could coast on them. Whether Holy Days earns its warmth or simply assumes it is the question the trailer’s high spirits cannot settle, and the notices out of its earliest markets will matter more than the logline ever could.

Judy Davis and Miriam Margolyes as nuns in Holy Days 2026 — Judy Davis and Miriam Margolyes in *Holy Days* (2026)

Alongside Davis, Margolyes and Weaver, the cast includes Elijah Tamati as Brian, Craig Hall as his father Joe, John Bach as the bishop pressing for the sale, and Jonny Brugh, familiar from New Zealand’s deadpan comedy tradition, as Father Findlay; Boltt herself appears as Liz. The film is a New Zealand–Canada co-production, backed by the New Zealand Film Commission alongside Téléfilm Canada and CBC Films, and runs a compact hundred-and-one minutes. It is an adventure comedy with a drama’s undertow, closer in temperament to a chamber piece with a windscreen than to broad farce.

Holy Days has already opened at home, playing New Zealand cinemas earlier in the year before reaching North American screens in the spring through Blue Fox Entertainment. Its next stops are the ones still ahead: an Australian release dated for mid-August and a United Kingdom and Ireland opening set for August 14. For anyone meeting three nuns, a stolen car and a South Island horizon for the first time, that is the date to hold.