Scarfies (1999): The Dunedin Student Thriller That Put Robert Sarkies and Taika Waititi on the Map

Every university town has a legend about an empty house that was too good to be true. Scarfies takes that legend, sets it in the cold student flats of Dunedin, New Zealand, and pushes it until a prank becomes a trap. Released in 1999, it remains one of the defining New Zealand films of its generation — a scruffy, funny, increasingly tense story about five students who make one bad decision and then have to live with the consequences in the same house.

The Film

The word needs translating outside New Zealand. A “scarfie” is a student at the University of Otago in Dunedin, named for the scarves worn against the bitter winters of the deep south, where the student quarter is famous for its damp, freezing, run-down houses. That setting is the engine of Robert Sarkies's film. Five college students move into an empty house and discover a large stash of marijuana inside it. Instead of walking away, they steal the pot and sell it.

For a while, the money makes the decision feel clever. Then the other side of the bargain arrives: the stash belonged to an angry drug dealer, and he comes looking for what was taken. What begins as a loose, observant student comedy tightens, room by room, into a siege thriller, with the house the students thought was a windfall becoming the place they are trapped.

Willa O'Neill, Ashleigh Seagar, Mark Neilson, and Neill Rea lead the cast, and the fifth name in our catalog listing holds particular interest now: Taika Cohen is Taika Waititi, credited early in his career under that name, years before he became one of New Zealand's most famous directors. Seeing him as part of an ensemble in another director's breakthrough film is part of the record this disc preserves. Sarkies, directing a New Zealand / Australian production, balances the two halves of the story — the comedy is recognisably student life, shared couches, empty pockets, and bad schemes — which is exactly why the turn into menace works. He lets one film grow out of the other instead of abandoning the first to make the second.

Why It's Rare

Scarfies was a genuine success at home, the kind of local film New Zealand audiences claimed as their own. That kind of success does not always travel. A film built on a piece of Dunedin slang, a specific university, and a specific style of southern student house needed explanation everywhere else, and films that need a footnote are the ones foreign distributors handle cautiously, release briefly, or pass over altogether.

So while New Zealand cinema of the 1990s is often reduced abroad to a handful of internationally distributed titles, Scarfies stayed in the category collectors know well: famous where it was made, hard to find where it was not. Home-video editions came and went in its home market, and for American viewers it settled into the limbo of a title you read about on lists of great New Zealand films and then could not easily find to watch. Waititi's later fame has only raised the curiosity around it.

Our Edition

Our listing is in English, with Spanish subtitles on this print, and the visual quality of this print is rated A in our catalog — an excellent rating for a film of this era and distribution history. Like every title at Gotta See DVDs, it is a DVD-R copy produced from the master print in our library, clearly labeled as a copy, and not presented as a factory-pressed studio original.

Get Scarfies on DVD — $19.99, and remember: every third movie in your cart is free.