Josephine Review| Searing, Unforgettable Drama Probes The Memory Of Violence

No trigger warning can brace you for Beth de Araújo’s indelible, scarring Sundance-premiering second film, Josephine. It’s tough, unbearably wrenching and could be the most vital film of the year. In the opening, the eight-year-old titular protagonist (Mason Reeves in a breakout role) is out for an early morning run with her dad Damien (Channing Tatum). Racing ahead, she pauses at the boundary of a park and chances across a violent rape. As she hides behind a tree and watches, the episode shifts everything she’s known about and understands the world. It rewires her vocabulary, perception, accelerating her intuition of danger. As she processes, she feels removed from everything. Her angle of absorbing sights and sensations tilts.

Her parents Claire (a subtly penetrating Gemma Chan) and Damien don’t immediately discuss what just transpired. So, Josephine googles rape (she types in “raip”), asks her schoolmate if she knows what “fuck” means. At a match, she inadvertently taunts boys that they can’t rape her. Lacking tools to frame what she’s seen in context, work through rape’s ramifications, Josephine is cast into a singular alienation. She tacks on the violence she’s watched. The unspoken trauma and fear instantly lodge in the child’s mind. The carefully constructed illusion of safety by her parents rapidly disintegrate. Josephine can’t shake off the sight of the rapist, Greg (Philip Ettinger), a vision wordlessly filing in and out of her room. Also, Josephine’s the only witness to the crime, with a lot riding on her testimony.

This is immensely thorny territory, but Araújo never takes a step back or softens her gaze. She’s determined to ask the toughest, most punishing questions. She knows exactly what she’s scrutinising and how it should ripple out. The world is coarse, vicious and relentless and the girl cannot run away. Josephine’s stumbling upon the rape prepones her coming-of-age, expedites her familiarity with rotten adult ways. Araújo’s unflinching hand never brutalises Josephine, but remains steadily committed and deeply empathetic as she struggles with the agonising weight of knowledge. Josephine’s accidental observation leaves her notions of sex and violence warped.

Tatum is crushing as a man torn between projecting masculinity and realising the world’s far more twisted than the tactics he thinks can guard oneself. The father still believes in idealised notions of justice. His first solution is ensuring Josephine enrol right away for self-defence classes, physically build herself up. But her mother with more lived experience knows it’s never enough. Neither is expecting justice clear-cut. Claire does want to talk about the incident with Jo. But Damien insists against it, not wanting to terrify her. Throughout the film, Damien tries to deflect and tiptoe around the rape, while Claire makes dreading, tentative gestures towards a dialogue. As she tells her daughter, she seeks to establish an open line of communication, which she didn’t get as a child. But Josephine remains shut in, refusing help. A later scene, when she turns to her mother and asks if she’s been raped, throws up a verbal denial, but the clear implications are devastating.

Araújo has the monumentally moving Reeves to register every fleck of a child’s life grotesquely upended. Each innocent question Josephine broaches to the cops, the psychologist, her parents, is met with emphasis on how ugly and merciless the world is. Closure is fraught with a minefield of honing a purer sense of pleasure and hurt. It’s the survivor, not the perpetrator, who has to endure being battered by suspicion and disbelief again and again. A jaw-dropping, hair-raising montage, splicing Jo’s self-defence classes with her mother’s ballet performance, effectively demonstrates a weave of beauty, agency and roughshod self-preservation. Hitting its best stride, Miles Ross’ score yanks through viscerally embodied interpellations of destabilising, disorienting nerviness.

Finally, when Damien does break down and confess he’s scared, his assumed shields having fallen through, it’s shattering. Josephine swoops on an irrevocably life-altering incident and then zooms out to reveal the absurdity of adults’ mangled attitudes, as it reflects to a child. Araújo shows what it takes for a child to gather resilience after the most unimaginable horror. Josephine’s hardening of psychological self isn’t just about shedding innocence, but also perceiving the world as it exists unvarnished. This film is a gutting nightmare for parents, or anyone even remotely concerned with where we are headed. Josephine is painfully essential viewing. Don’t miss it.

Debanjan Dhar is covering the Sundance Film Festival as part of the accredited press.