Head South review: NZ coming-of-age punk dramedy is special

Writer–director Jonathan Ogilvie’s fourth feature Head South first struck me as New Zealand’s answer to Sing Street (2015), John Carney’s coming-of-age musical set in 1980s Dublin.

In Christchurch in November 1979, teenage Angus (Ed Oxenbould) seeks to impress sophisticated London punk chick Holly (Roxie Mohebbi) by pretending to be a punk rocker. But when his fictitious trio The Daleks book a real show supporting local Johnny Rotten wannabe Malcolm (Demos Murphy), Angus needs bandmates – and seeks help from budding guitarist Kirsten (Stella Bennett, aka Kiwi singer/songwriter Benee), who works at the local chemist.

As in Sing Street, Angus’s romantic dreams are fed by a cool older brother and contrasted with his parents’ quiet unhappiness. Angus’s brother Rory has moved to London, while their discontented mum has moved out after laying in a supply of frozen casseroles for Angus and his sardonic dad Gordon (Márton Csókás) to eat awkwardly together.

Watch the Head South trailer.

But Head South is more special than your average nostalgic coming-of-age musical. While its lovely home-movie-textured cinematography subtly evokes its era, Csókás’s sensitive performance signals its themes are melancholy, even gothic – and not just in the post-punk sense. Tonally, it reminded me most of Andrew Lancaster’s unsettling, underrated Accidents Happen (2009).

Head South: growing pains of cool

Indie-music heads will still find Head South satisfying as a nostalgic quasi-origin story for iconic New Zealand record label Flying Nun and the South Island music scene it nurtured in the early 1980s. Ogilvie has also fictionalised his own underground cult band YFC, an experimental trio of two bassists and a drummer.

Head South is full of easter eggs, from posters for seminal Christchurch bands to the way the insouciant record-shop manager Fraser (Jackson Bliss, seemingly inspired by Flying Nun founder Roger Shepherd) likes Angus’s Doctor Who-inspired band name because it’s cool to name things after 1960s TV shows. The soundtrack is by Shayne Carter, frontman of Flying Nun band Straitjacket Fits – some of whose music videos Ogilvie directed.

The PIL record Rory sends him from London acts as Angus’s pretext to finally brave Middle Earth Records – although the shop’s prog-fantasy name and Clockwork Orange signage font hint it’s not completely at pop culture’s cutting edge. To fit in here, Angus cuts his surfie hair, staples his trousers so skinny he can barely mount his bike, pins a bass-guitar badge to his blazer, and steals his dad’s pointy-toed wedding shoes – much to Gordon’s sarcastic mirth.

Angus sheds his dorkiness as painfully as he undresses in the weird scene where local hipster Andy (Arlo Gibson) agrees to lend Angus his bass guitar if Angus will pose for ‘art photos’. It could have been played for laughs, but Ogilvie immerses us ambiguously in a peer-pressure stress test of the sort kids are warned about in high-school personal development classes.

Likewise, when Angus first visits Andy’s house, Holly answers the door, then orders him to bring her a cup of tea in the bath; Angus isn’t sure if she’s mocking him, flirting with him, or just living her anarchic punk lifestyle.

Oxenbould’s performance underscores Angus’s social ordeal; by turns endearing and excruciating, Oxenbould broadcasts Angus’s every emotion on his soft face. I was just about dying onstage alongside Angus when he’s too scared even to start playing.

But there are nice little moments when those around Angus nudge him forward while allowing him to feel he’s making independent choices – like when Gordon pretends to fall asleep in front of the TV so Angus can ‘sneak out’ to watch a punk show. Even Angus’s normie schoolfriends Jamie (Trendall Pulini) and Stuart (Oscar Phillips) turn out to be more than just the dorks he leaves behind.

Head South: sensing other worlds

Ogilvie’s most intriguing suggestion is that Christchurch’s underground music scene is just one of many worlds outsiders can sense, but not see clearly. Here on New Zealand’s South Island, anything exciting is happening further north; even Auckland seems more cosmopolitan.

If Angus can sense the punk world as seismic ripples from a far-off youthquake, then the ghosts his eccentric great-Aunt Jessica (Janice Gray) can sense must be equally real. Angus finds Aunt Jessica ridiculous, but Gordon is willing to reach beyond the veil. So, eventually, is Angus. Loss entangles with yearning entangles with music – a warning to those who seek the unknown.

When Kirsten first plays her song ‘Head South’ to Angus, he assumes it’s an oral sex reference; she reminds him it’s an idiom for failure. The film literalises this metaphor when Angus and Gordon watch a TV news report on the crash of Air New Zealand Flight 101 into Mount Erebus, Antarctica, killing all 257 on board.

Angus’s parents had planned to take that very Antarctic sightseeing flight, but had decided against it, humouring a warning from Aunt Jessica. Gordon explains to Angus that the plane crashed because the pilot mistook magnetic south for true south.

This existential distinction between the true and the merely magnetic becomes the film’s leitmotif.

Gordon is a disappointed seeker: his home’s mid-century modern décor hints at a history of being drawn to status symbols that only leave him further lost. Kirsten, by contrast, is grounded in her own world, uninterested in impressing others. She draws, but doesn’t go to art school; she has elite-level music knowledge but scorns the ‘scene’, practising guitar and writing songs at home.

We viewers can sense that Kirsten, not Holly, will be Angus’s ‘true south’, and that together they’ll find their way to something more authentic than Malcolm’s aggro punk pastiche.

Some might find the film’s ending downbeat, but to me it’s hopeful: Angus will navigate life’s ordeals without ever really losing the people who matter – even if from the stage they’re invisible to him, in the loudness of the dark.

Head South is currently showing in select Australian cinemas.

Discover film & TV reviews on ScreenHub …