Movie Review: PUNCH

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: March 10th, 2023 / 03:49 AM

PUNCH movie poster | ©2023 Dark Sky Pictures

Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Tim Roth, Jordan Oosterhof, Conan Hayes
Writer: Welby Ings
Director: Welby Ings
Distributor: Dark Star Pictures
Release Date: March 10, 2023 (theatrical, on demand); April 11, 2023 (DVD)

PUNCH begins with some young boys playing on a hill, paper wings strapped to their backs and dark goggles over their eyes. Stan (Tim Roth) retrieves his son Jim from the group.

Now in his teens, Jim (Jordan Oosterhof) is being trained by Stan as a boxer. Stan works at a cement-making plant and Jim is still in high school. They live in the small New Zealand town of Pirau.

One of the other local adolescents is Whetu (Conan Hayes), who paints his nails and half-revels in/half-resents his outsider status. Whetu is openly gay, which makes him a target in this place that in some ways looks like it’s stuck in the ‘50s.

Jim and Whetu have a few initially hostile encounters. Then Jim, running in the surf, gets stung by a jellyfish, and Whetu comes to the rescue. Whetu has found an abandoned shack and decorated it with elements that express his identity as a nature-loving, fabulous-identifying gay Maori man. Jim is impressed.

The friendship between Jim and Whetu ebbs and flows. Jim is attracted to both Whetu’s ability to defy convention and his talent (Whetu is also a singer/songwriter), but is himself afraid to be seen by his peers as too close to a gay man. Whetu basks in Jim’s admiration, but is afraid of emotional intimacy.

At the same time, Jim is getting more and more disturbed by his father’s alcoholism. At the same time, Jim deplores how badly Stan is treated on the job. All of this is tied into Jim’s promising boxing career.

Director/writer Welby Ings handles everything with more sensitivity than specificity. We see Jim training a lot, and hear that a big boxing match is coming up, but we never find out how Jim actually feels about boxing (does he love it? Is he doing it for Stan’s approval).

The timeline is fuzzy overall. We don’t know how long it is before the big fight, or how long it is between Jim and Whetu’s bouts of closeness and alienation.

And even in a small town, it seems a convenient coincidence that the villains in one part of the story are also the villains in the other. There is violence, but it is handled so discreetly that we don’t feel it viscerally; it’s more of a plot point than something that galvanizes us with sentiments of fear or revenge.

The coastal scenery is gorgeous, and Ings and lead actor Oosterhof find the joy in pure physicality as Jim runs and soars among the dunes.

Back in the ‘70s through ‘90s, American, Canadian, and British filmmakers created a lot of LGBTQ fare that was about young people making personal discoveries. Much (though by no means all) of this was so consumed with the notion of simply discussing and depicting this with tenderness and respect that the overall storytelling was neglected.

PUNCH is reminiscent of those movies. As a result, it is likely to be more moving to those who are new to the genre than those who feel that PUNCH is commendable at heart but, New Zealand setting aside, doesn’t have much to say that’s new or impactful.

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A sympathetic but familiar coming-of-age drama

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Article: Movie Review: PUNCH

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