Following the outstanding international success of Whale Rider, the next New Zealand coming-of-age film to attract critical acclaim and attention, both nationally and abroad, was Brad McGann's adaptation of an iconic novel by Maurice Gee, In My Father's Den, originally published in 1972. Hailed as being one of the best films to come out of the Antipodes, this film won a host of awards at international film festivals, including the prestigious International Critics’ Award at the Toronto International Film Festival, with praise given for the emotional maturity, striking performances, and visual grace displayed in its story of a damaged young man who returns from overseas to his family in New Zealand and gradually comes to terms with the traumatic aspects of his childhood experience that he has repressed, having sought to evade them by retreating physically overseas, and emotionally into a self-imposed form of detachment. In terms of its status as a coming-of-age film, In My Father's Den constitutes a post-adolescence coming of age on the part of the main character, Paul (Matthew Mcfadyen), that has been forestalled and delayed by earlier trauma, while also containing a second coming of age on the part of a teenage girl, Celia (Emily Barclay), that in certain respects mirrors the first, but has a tragic outcome.

Apart from being one of the most accomplished of all New Zealand films, McGann's In My Father's Den (2004) reveals more clearly than any other the two main functions of the coming-of-age genre in the context of a national cinema. At one level, it accomplishes a radical updating of the cultural perspective of its literary source, thus serving to register shifts that had occurred in New Zealand society between the period in which Gee wrote (the 1960s and 1970s) and that in which McGann made his film (the 2000s). Whereas for Gee the cause of the tragedy at the heart of the story – the murder of an innocent seventeen-year-old girl – lay in the damaging effects on two brothers of a repressive upbringing under the influence of a harshly repressive Presbyterian mother, for McGann, it arose from ‘the harbouring of family secrets’ and the effects of lack of communication and of miscommunication.