The three films examined so far show two divergent stylistic tendencies that can be observed in the New Zealand coming-of-age film. Whereas The God Boy and The Scarecrow employ a fairly austere, conventional style to attain a degree of realism, leavened by occasional art-cinema flourishes (such as the surrealistic montage sequence in the former and several intrusions of expressionistic lighting in the latter), Sleeping Dogs deployed such devices as fast cutting, handheld camera sequences, and aerial shots to achieve the kind of heightened effects found in American action movies. In contradistinction, Vincent Ward's Vigil (1984) moves in a completely different direction, eschewing both realism and the style of Hollywood action movies in order to exploit to the fullest possible extent the stylistic devices and narrative strategies of European art-cinema. It is also the first major coming-of-age full-length feature film made during the New Zealand New Wave to be based on an original screenplay, rather than on a pre-existing literary source.

In terms of its plot, in fact, very little happens in Vigil: on a remote farm surrounded by the New Zealand bush, a farmer, Justin Peers (Gordon Shields), dies while trying to rescue one of his sheep off a cliff face, to the horror of his eleven-year-old daughter, Lisa, nicknamed ‘Toss,’ who witnesses the tragedy; a poacher, Ethan Ruir (Frank Whitten), comes on the scene and is hired as a farmhand, incurring the deep resentment of Toss when she sees him taking the place of her dead father and becoming an object of sexual interest to her mother, Elizabeth (Penelope Kay). At the end of the movie, the three of them, together with Toss’ grandfather, Birdie (Bill Kerr), leave the farm to begin a new life elsewhere, with Ethan heading off in a separate direction. In addition to this paucity of action, the film adopts a minimalist style that has remarkably little dialogue, and unexplained temporal gaps between the various sequences. All of this means that the whole burden of the film is placed on its expression of the emotions the characters feel at finding themselves in this situation – especially the emotions of Toss, through whose eyes we see most of the action. The choice of an art-cinema style, with its elliptical narrative, subjective framing of the shots, and symbolic landscapes and evocative objects, was functional to this end.