On the outside looking in: Suburban aesthetics and awkwardness in New Zealand/Aotearoan romantic comedy.

This article examines how "awkward" spatiality is constructed in recent New Zealand/Aotearoan romantic comedies, focusing on Taika Waititi's *Eagle vs Shark* (2007) and Madeline Sami and Jen van der Beek's *The Breaker Upperers* (2019). It situates these films within the US quirky film tradition and Hollywood romantic comedy genre, arguing that unlike their American counterparts, they use awkwardness as a political strategy to highlight marginalized experiences related to New Zealand's landscape, indigeneity, and non-normative femininity. Both films subvert typical urban glamour by emphasizing suburban and rural spaces as sites of cultural and social exclusion, reflecting New Zealand's peripheral status in global cinema and the complexities of Indigenous and queer identities. The article highlights how these films engage with global genre conventions while asserting a distinct Aotearoan perspective on romance, identity, and space.