Kiwi-made, modern day Western shot in the valleys of North Canterbury, about a lone traveller’s dangerous and complex journey through the peculiar town of Netherwood. Stars Miriama Smith, Mick Innes and Owen Black.
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Anchored by old-fashioned wild west tropes of land entitlement and ownership, cultural pride and legacy, estranged sons and fathers, Cristobal Lobos’ competently made slice of Kiwiana Netherwood serves up its hilariously aggressive machismo with borderline satirical fervour, depicting the iconic New Zild bloke as a pie-eating, beer-swilling, chest-beating alpha-beast ready to assert their hardness where possible (sample dialogue: “You’re worse than a woman”).
Shorty St’s sufficiently rugged Owen Black plays Stanley Harris, a drifter who wanders into the fictional titular town en route to a trawling job in Tauranga. There his father’s old buddy Gordie (Mick Innes) offers him some work pruning trees, but it inadvertently embroils him in a real estate tug o’ war with local man Duncan (Peter McCawley), who thinks the property should be his, and whose thuggish son Mex (Will Hall) is hell-bent on driving Stanley outta town. Miriama Smith pops up as a mystery woman who seems to only exist to make us wonder why she’s hanging around the woods making breakfast for Stanley.
The North Canterbury landscapes add a touch of expansiveness that occasionally masks the film’s low budget, which is most glaring when the action seems to divide its time mostly between two locations: the pub – unabashed in its Harrington Gold product placement – and the woods, where the film’s level of sinister incident is limited to an unseen culprit stringing up dead possums on trees and throwing pine cones at Stanley (that’ll show him!).
