A Kiwi comedy that’s worth hanging with

Hang Time is an easy film to like. The setting is fantastic, the cast are likeable and enthusiastic and the story is light, relatable and mostly pretty briskly conveyed.

The producers’ stated aim of making entertaining and easy-to-watch films is a deceptively bold and confident move in the self-funded market that is usually the territory of desperate-to-shock horrors and anxious-to-be-taken-seriously dramas.

Hang Time knows it is a competent and modestly well-written piece and it wears its confidence well. If you met

Hang Time at a party, it would be smartly dressed and good at small talk. As, I imagine, would be its cast.

Harry (Chronesthesia’s Hayden Weal) is heartbroken. His fiancee has called off the wedding only days out from the event. Still, with the vineyard venue booked and all the wine paid for, it makes sense to go for the weekend anyway, with his best bro’ in tow and friend Jess waiting to meet them.

Once in Marlborough, with cases of booze, another young woman and a mildly deranged uncle introduced to the cast, and a landscape to die for to frolic about in, the stage is set for pretty much anything to go down. And then, well, not a lot does.

The storyline and setting might owe something to Sideways, but Hang Time isn’t aiming for anything like that film’s excavation of the darker basements of the alcoholic soul.

The cast – Weal, Nick Davies, Gemma Knight, Katrina George and Steve Barr, the latter sporting a beard of such untamed exuberance it deserves its own credit, the rest all shiny, attractive and mostly radiating the positivity of youth and relative self-assurance – all acquit themselves well with the partly improvised dialogue. And the landscapes are startlingly well-captured for the minuscule budget by director of photography Brandon Te Moananui.

Hang Time is a slight film, but it does exactly what it was sent here to do. All films want to be liked, whether the makers know it or not. It’s rare to see a film that wears that want so openly, and even rarer to see one that achieves it so winningly, with so few moving parts.

So bravo Hang Time and debut writer/ director Casey Zilbert. I usually do everything I can to avoid the well-dressed and the good-at-small-talk types that I meet, but you won me over by the end.

Hang Time will have its premiere in Blenheim on Saturday, before touring the country. See facebook.com/ Hangtimemovie.