Jim is preparing for his first professional fight but begins to rethink his life's trajectory and his sexuality after tangling with Whetu, a gay Maori boy who spends his days in an old shack down by the beach. A young boxer in small town New Zealand trains hard under pressure from his alcoholic father and meets an unassimilated gay man living in a shack on the beach. Tim Roth has top billing as an exhausted alcoholic with no energy left for anything in life apart from his son's boxing training, but his character definitely takes a backseat to the two distinctive and empathetic young men, played by Jordan Oosterhof and Conan Hayes. Oosterhof plays Jim, a boxer with a lean, muscular body and sensitive blue eyes, who passes in this shitty, uptight small town because he's an athlete and masculine. Hayes plays Whetu, who is a social reject from the start of the film; gay, out and Māori, with no known social connections. He is an artist and a sex worker and has carved a tiny world for himself in a beautifully decorated shack in the sand dunes of a big empty black-sand beach past a “no trespassing” sign. It is typical to cast pretty actors to play romantic leads, but here we find characters who we love because they are beautiful as complete humans. The love story refreshingly has nothing to do with perpetuating the romantic myth or attaining the higher state of a monogamous committed relationship. These two characters, so coherently woven into the world of this moving film, are merely two people who take the opportunity to open their hearts to each other before moving on with their lives.