Josephine

 

Writer/director Beth de Araújo

director on the set with Channing Tatum and Mason Reeves

director with lead cast

Mason Reeves

JOSEPHINE                           A-                                                                                              USA  (119 mi)  2026  d: Beth de Araújo

A unique and startling experience from Beth de Araújo, who grew up in San Francisco, the daughter of a Chinese-American ballerina mother and Brazilian Olympic runner father, playing soccer, like her dad, while majoring in Sociology at UC Berkeley, and has an MFA in Screenwriting from AFI.  Describing the film as “Taxi Driver meets The Kid With a Bike (Le gamin au vélo),” writing a film where “Travis Bickle was an eight-year-old girl,” the end result is an intensely powerful film, based on an actual event from her own childhood, having witnessed a disturbing incident of seeing a man sexually assaulting a woman while jogging in the park with her father, claiming certain scenes are “100% autobiographical,” as she’d “go to Golden Gate Park every Saturday with my father and play soccer with him.”  An honest depiction of trauma and the ripple effect it has, this is honest, tragic, and raw from start to finish, a painfully intense account of the psychological consequences of incomprehension, confusion, and shock.  From its stark and unsparing opening scene, this film immerses us in the experience of an eight-year-old girl who witnesses a rape while out running with her father, crafting a highly provocative and nuanced examination of sexual violence, leading to flawed and chillingly imperfect justice, but with a pre-teen girl experiencing the heightened senses and paranoia that can be produced in the wake of trauma, as the world that she knows is shattered and slowly begins to deteriorate before her eyes.  Disturbing and harrowing, yet also tenderly naturalistic and wonderfully complex, the project began as part of the 2018 Sundance Institute Screenwriting and Directing Lab, taking years to develop before ultimately winning the Sundance Grand Prize and Audience Choice Award, recalling the horrors of Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible (Irréversible) (2002), only from a child’s point of view, as a little 8-year old girl is haunted by what she sees in just the opening few minutes of the film, where like Noé’s film, the superb use of music and sound reverberates through every frame of the film.  Even though this didn’t happen to her, she is still a sexual abuse survivor, something her parents have a hard time comprehending, yet it’s extremely well done, as the director seems to have all the intimate details right, which is the astonishing aspect, where the psychological toll this takes on her young life is nothing less than astonishing in how this is portrayed cinematically, where she sees the perpetrator everywhere, even at home and in her room, a manifestation of her feelings, always seen wearing the same green shirt he wore when he committed the crime, appearing like a shadow that simply follows her around.  A beautifully crafted psychological thriller, police investigation, and judicial drama, while also a study of the modern family, an examination of American society, and the violence that pervades it, this is assuredly realized as a taut and absorbing indie drama where both the girl and her parents prove ill-equipped to navigate the complexities of the case as it moves from crime to courtroom, from innocence to innocence lost, with a dramatically powerful script that unfolds on its own.  Each gesture and emotional journey is measured and handled with utmost care, beautifully layered in humanity, providing a devastating portrait of a young girl who is forced to confront impossible cruelty and surrender the safety she once knew, with a knockout performance from an 8-year old child actress.

Captivating from beginning to end, beautifully shot in San Francisco by Greta Zozula, displaying a visual elegance, the film stars eight-year old Chinese-Costa Rican actress Mason Reeves as the entitled character Josephine, who had been scouted at a local Clement Street Farmer’s Market at the age of seven, whose gripping and disturbing performance is the mainstay of the film, much more internalized than other children’s roles, recalling some of the best child performances, like nine-year old Anna Paquin in Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993), who won an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress, and four-year-old Victoire Thivisol in Jacques Doillon’s PONETTE (1996), whose remarkable performance won her the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the 1996 Venice Film Festival.  Due to the maturity level of the subject matter, where viewer discretion is strongly advised, actress Reeves has never seen the first part of the film (it will be her choice once she turns 18), and was carefully insulated from explicit audience questions.  Josephine lives with her introverted mother Claire (Gemma Chan), a performing ballerina, and her muscular more extroverted father Damien (Channing Tatum) in an upscale San Francisco home, typically going on Sunday early morning runs through Golden Gate Park with her father after watching Premier League Soccer, both avid fans of Liverpool F.C.  On this occasion, he begins to tire, so she runs ahead, finding herself hiding behind a tree as she witnesses a woman walk into a women’s rest room alone, followed shortly afterwards by a man who is seen dragging her out to heavy screams, throwing her to the ground where he punches her, momentarily knocking her out, as her screams quickly stop while he rips off her clothes and violently rapes her, continuing as she regains consciousness.  At one point, with his hands on her throat, the woman on the ground and Josephine’s eyes meet, with her perfect, impassive stare, causing nothing but confusion, as Josephine is emotionally overwhelmed and bewildered by what she sees.  The rape occurs openly in plain view, where nothing is implied or suggested, as the entire event is depicted, turning horribly graphic and explicit.  When her father catches up and realizes what’s happening, he immediately goes after the guy, who has run away, while also calling the police who arrive shortly afterwards.  Josephine is placed in the same police car as the shivering woman (Syra McCarthy), and can only stare quizzically, where this woman may as well be a creature from outer space.  The rapist (Philip Ettinger, from Paul Schrader’s First Reformed in 2017) is quickly captured, but Josephine’s world is immediately turned upside down, growing erratic, feeling frustrated, experiencing tantrums, while displaying violent outbursts at school, even blurting out, seemingly out of nowhere, “When can I have a gun?,” causing concern for her parents, who have differing views on what to do.  Her dad assures her that an assault like that will never happen to her, with her mom reacting instinctively, “You cannot say that.”  Claire wants to take her to therapy, while Damien insists that she enroll in self-defense classes, with both approaches feeling inadequate, as she remains disoriented and confused, laden with fear, which is further exacerbated by the incessant arguing of her parents, where any idea of normal has vanished altogether.  Asking afterwards, “What was the man doing?,” everyone dodges the question, but after hearing a discussion that includes the word “rape,” Josephine has to look up its meaning, and starts to see the world of men as an increasingly dirty and dangerous place.

We’re left with a uniquely modern portrait of how there is no right way to navigate healing from trauma, which can seep into our daily lives, at school, at home, or in quiet moments, where there’s simply no language to process what happened, where we’re all just doing our best to navigate the repercussions, often without fully understanding them ourselves.  Because the victim refuses to testify, it is suddenly solely up to the child to ensure that the rapist can be brought to justice and convicted, which is a huge burden for her tender age, suddenly experiencing the misogynous tactics of a legal system designed to protect male rapists and pressure witnesses, while at the same time blaming victims.  Perhaps the scene of the film is when father and daughter attend a live ballet performance that features her mother on stage in a sexually charged dance with three other men, where there’s a whirlwind of rapturous emotions, but what’s especially memorable is how the performance is constantly interrupted by a montage of fractured daydreams that simply haunt this family like a curse placed upon them, completely altering their psychological mindset, where the abstract editing is simply brilliant, mixing the known and the unknown, the understood and the misunderstood, the visible and the invisible.  But it all comes back to the child’s perspective, and the rippling effects of that experience, where what’s done cannot be undone, as she can’t necessarily verbalize how she feels, yet her shattered experience comprises nearly every frame of this film, with the directing ramping up the sound design and the incredible, all-intrusive score by Miles Ross, Araújo's real-life partner, which has a way of haunting viewers as they watch this ominous spectacle unraveling before our eyes.  What starts out as familiar classical string instruments that we usually hear in movies evolves over time, becoming more electronically oblique and dissonant, with very disturbing undertones, where this clash of soundscapes becomes an emotional arc through the film, which culminates in a parallel resolution to the character.  It becomes a cinematic experience that feels like an assault to the senses, where viewers can also feel completely overwhelmed by the intensity of what they are witnessing, left feeling exposed, vulnerable, and joltingly uncomfortable, where every step of the way we’re aware of the magnitude of the horror Josephine witnessed.  Her routine of police investigators, court appearances, child psychologists, and parental disagreements is constantly interrupted, bringing mayhem and paranoia into their lives, always having to look over their shoulder, hypersensitive when anything is out of place, while Josephine becomes obsessed with nightmarish visions of the rapist following her around, literally inhabiting her life, as if flooded by a nightmarish world of bad dreams.  A poetic powerhouse, better in every way than we could have imagined, made in a way where viewers literally see what she sees, and feel what she feels, which only magnifies and individualizes the horror, with the director doing an exquisite job incorporating the luxurious beauty of San Francisco, including a father and daughter talk at the Fort Point National Historic Site under the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge, linking this to other notable films shot there, like Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and Peter Yates’ Bullitt (1968), or more recently Barry Jenkins’ Medicine for Melancholy (2008). 

Note

In America, one in five women experience rape or attempted rape, while nearly half the women in the United States experience some form of sexual violence in their lifetime, The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, and one in three in Europe, Nearly one-third of women in the EU are subject to violence.

Limbo (2023)

 

Writer/director Ivan Sen

LIMBO           B                                                                                                                 Australia  (108 mi)  2023  ‘Scope  d: Ivan Sen

Sometimes you can just never find the truth.  You’ve got to find another way to make peace.       —Charlie (Rob Collins)

Not to be confused with the John Sayles film Limbo (1999), Ivan Sen’s MYSTERY ROAD (2013) and Goldstone (2016), both featuring an Aboriginal police detective, were extremely popular with the Australian public, where the lead protagonist held immense appeal, leading to a spin-off television series, while this takes us into that same barren wasteland, but from the perspective of a much more flawed white homicide police detective who stirs things up in the middle of nowhere by searching for sufficient clues to determine if there’s enough evidence to re-open a 20-year old unsolved murder of a local Aboriginal girl whose body was never found, a case left unsolved by a disinterested and incompetent police investigation.  A bleak and layered drama filled with long pauses and endless silences, where you can hear the sound of gravel underneath the wheels of a car, time simply moves more slowly out there, as we find ourselves in one of the most desolate places on the planet, like living in oblivion, where the land is as abused as the characters living there, discovering that people remain damaged and disconnected both from themselves and each other, and most especially from their families, as things that don’t make sense tend to happen all the time, causing confusion and bewilderment, where justice or trust are simply not part of the local vocabulary.  Another director who writes, directs, produces, shoots, edits, and scores his own films, Sen flips the script with this strangely detached “outback-noir” tale, shot in just 16 days in the Coober Pedy region of South Australia, known as the opal capital of the world, where the world-weary residents are beaten down by the dire and exhausting circumstances, expecting and saying very little, as they’re literally in limbo, featuring stunning aerial viewpoints and stark black and white photography that accentuates a treeless, moon-like terrain where nothing grows in the scorching daytime heat of this barren landscape, filled with the cratered remnants of extensive opal mining and underground dwellings to escape the heat.  Sen’s earlier features highlighted the constant police harassment of Indigenous people (referred to in the film as blacks), offering the perspective of the justice system through the eyes of an Indigenous police officer, but here he turns an unflinching eye on the effects of that harassment, expressed through a pervasive aversion toward the police, who are viewed suspiciously.  This is a world where black girls and women are routinely targeted by predatory white men, but the police turn a blind eye, refusing to invest resources, ask questions, or take a young Indigenous girl’s disappearance seriously, as if it hardly matters, incidents that are all too common with Indigenous family histories, shifting the blame from the real perpetrators to instead targeting local black men and boys with endless threats of violence.  This film explores the deeper impact of a crime on one Indigenous family through the eyes of a white policeman, taking place in a ghost town where there’s no conceivable local authority, examining the damage caused by a failed justice system and the resilience of those who continue to endure its consequences, discovering lost souls crushed under the weight of longstanding racist indifference.   

At the center of the picture is Simon Baker, who surprisingly made an early appearance decades ago in Curtis Hanson’s L.A. Confidential (1997), but more recently starred in the TV series The Mentalist (2008-2015), taking his earnings to support the Australian film industry, specifically working with Indigenous filmmakers, seen here playing Travis Hurley, a white policeman who is sent to this lone outpost to determine if there’s enough evidence to reopen the case of a young Indigenous girl, Charlotte, who disappeared twenty years ago without a trace, where the negligence of the police investigation has corroded the community and torn the family apart.  But Travis is no ordinary cop, as we see him preparing and shooting narcotics into his arm at the local hotel, whose underground rooms are built into the old tunnels of a mine, where the cave-like walls resemble a tomb, as the people that live here are calloused by the harshness of the landscape and the merciless disregard for their lives by the authorities, leaving each one of them isolated and alone, cut off from the outside world and each other, living in a no man’s land where all hope has been abandoned, recalling the message outside the gates of Hell in Dante’s Inferno, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”  Travis starts with the family, who are eviscerated by loss and grief, beginning with Charlie (Rob Collins), the girl’s brother, an opal miner who lives alone in a trailer, exiled away from his family, where he is wracked by guilt, loneliness, and regret.  Emma (Natasha Wanganeen from Phillip Noyce’s RABBIT-PROOF FENCE in 2002) is the surviving sister working as a waitress in a local café, raising two girls and a boy, one of her own and two of Charlie’s estranged kids, living in what feels like worlds apart.  The reclusive and suspicious Joseph (Nicholas Hope) is supposedly the aging brother of a white prospector named Leon, named as a suspect in the original investigation, who’s alleged to be dead, having suffered from dementia, where some form of forgetting seems to have afflicted the entire nation, yet Joseph barely ever sees anyone and stays alone living in his mine with his dog, with literally nowhere else to go.  It’s clear from the start that the case was never properly investigated, as at the time the girl was initially reported missing, it took weeks before the police even investigated, shifting away from the known white suspects to threatening the local Indigenous population, shoddily covering it up by framing her brother Charlie, an easy target who became something of a racist smokescreen, yet typical of the way these investigations have gotten sidetracked by economic and social privileges for the past hundred years, incidents that routinely tear families apart, leaving behind a lingering stench of racist disdain.  In many ways this mirrors the fiasco surrounding the Bowraville murders, unsolved serial killings of three Aboriginal children in the early 1990’s, where the white murder suspect has continually eluded criminal prosecution.  This devastatingly tender film, mostly comprised of small, casual moments, symbolizes the history of atrocities committed by white colonial settlers against Aboriginal peoples over centuries, reflective of the White Australia policy and the collective amnesia of the nation, leading to decades of exploitation and community neglect just in the last century, emblematic of how difficult it is to survive in this forbidding landscape and for traumatic wounds to heal.   

Delving into the godforsaken territory explored in Jane Campion’s television mini-series 2013 Top Ten List #9 Top of the Lake, this is not a white savior movie, offering no redemptive salvation and no quick fix, as a disillusioned Travis is a bit jaded himself, with his own troubled past, coming from a broken marriage, leaving him something of a shell of a man, hardly the answer to anyone’s prayers, listening to evangelical religious messages on the car radio as he arrives into this outback mining town, literally searching for his own personal salvation, which is intertwined in his quest for meaning, informing children “I came out of the sky” when asked where he comes from.  Moving from person to person, becoming a stoic intermediary whose greatest strength lies in his ability to listen, even if only fragments and hints are offered to him, he slowly makes inroads as people who initially clammed up on him for fear of reprisals become more outspoken, offering relevant bits and pieces of insight as he begins to piece together what happened.  Leon, the prime suspect, was known for hosting drinking parties that lured teenage black girls into his cave, where these women had a habit of feeling drugged and sedated when they woke up the next morning, like having their memories erased.  At the outset, Joseph indicates his brother died in the past year, yet no one else remembers Leon ever had a brother, leaving unanswered questions that oppressively linger in the air, with suggestions that not everyone is telling the truth.  Charlie had been falsely accused of Charlotte’s murder in the early days of the investigation, after the corrupt police tortured two other men into lying, saying they had witnessed the crime.  After an exasperated mental breakdown, Charlie questioned his own fitness to adequately parent, so his two kids began living with his sister Emma.  And that is simply par for the course in this part of the world, exposing the marginalization faced by Indigenous communities, with no reliance on outside help, faced with systemic racism and the lingering effects of colonialism, where revisiting generational trauma by failed attempts to respectfully redress injustice highlights the complexities of loss experienced by Aboriginal Australians.  This is no ordinary police thriller, reduced to a series of conversations, though part of its unique effect is the way it subverts our own expectations, slowly unraveling, yet never arriving at any sense of resolution, with Travis ultimately becoming a kind of catalyst and healer within this fractured family, yet we’re left adrift, cut off from any form of justice, much like this Aboriginal culture, an otherworldly living culture that has never been truly embraced by the larger Australian community, remaining at odds, like its own force of nature, which can be felt but not seen or truly understood, in much the same way nature is presented in the Peter Weir film Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975).  Notable for its ambiguity, and its moody mix of bare-bones plot and eccentric characters, Aboriginal culture is a metaphysical presence that remains an enigma that mainstream white Australia fails to grasp, forever haunting us with its own intrinsic mysteries, where it’s rare to find a film that explores the depths of psychological damage with this degree of complexity.