Punch is the story of Jamie, a boy in a backwater, small town in New Zealand who is training as a boxer under the tutelage of his alcoholic father, and who has a coming-of-age romance with a local openly queer Maori boy, Whetu.
I came to this film wanting to like it so much. Queer romance with an indigenous lead character? Yes please! But Punch is absolutely all over the place. I could nitpick over the overuse of slow motion, but it’s a first feature, you expect the director to still be learning the ropes. But Punch has bigger problems.
Midway through the film Whetu is the target of a hate crime, and is physically and sexually assaulted. I think the filmmaker did not understand how that scene changed the entire film. I think they thought that, as long as you don’t show the penetrative act, it’s not graphic, but massively underestimated how graphic and traumatic it felt. After that the film goes back to following Jamie preparing for this big match he has coming up, and you are like, “Seriously, do you think anyone gives a fuck about this now? Why is the white kid’s boxing match being forefronted? Literally nothing else matters compared to this.”
It changes the whole trajectory of the film. Their tentative romance storyline treats it as a blip, as though that wouldn’t have any impact on your first romantic sexual experience. And you are waiting for these attackers to get their comeuppance, for a movie called Punch centred on a boxer whose lover has just been assaulted to move towards some kind of confrontation. But it’s put on the back burner for much less interesting stuff, and when it finally is addressed, it’s so clunky, reacted to so unnaturally, and even stevens as though that’s the end of things in a way that’s wholly unbelievable and narratively unsatisfying.
The film suffers from a failure to show, don’t tell. People state the obvious repeatedly, like saying, “You’re drunk” to a swaying man, as though the audience don’t have eyes. The main character has a monologue about how it still isn’t safe to be gay, in what feels like the filmmaker just using the character as a puppet to speak through, unnatural and not actually touching on the character’s emotional state, and utterly redundant after we just sat through and watched a homophobic sexual assault.
I’d love to be able to recommend Punch, it has some fine performances from Tim Roth as Jamie’s father, and from the two young actors playing Whetu and Jamie. But it’s a film that is unknowingly traumatising, and doesn’t handle the weight of what it’s dealing with mindfully enough.