Josephine, the titular character of Beth de Araújo’s stunning second feature, is eight years old. Played by equally remarkable newcomer Mason Reeves, Josephine likes playing soccer with her dad Damien (a phenomenal Channing Tatum), with whom she is close – the film’s crisp, near wordless opening minutes, which shift seamlessly from Josephine’s perspective to third party co-conspirator, running with the pair through San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, swiftly convey a tender, playful bond: supportive, teasing father and innocent child.
That’s about all we know of Josephine – all we need to know, really – before seeing the incident that ruptures her youth. Having run ahead of her father at the park, Josephine alone witnesses the brutal rape of a female jogger by a man in a distinctive aqua polo. Much to the audible shock of viewers at the Sundance premiere, de Araújo rejects the ellipsis now de rigueur in movies handling sexual assault, how much of post-MeToo cinema – Promising Young Woman, She Said, Women Talking, last year’s Sundance standout Sorry, Baby – have skipped over or elided the actual assault, de-emphasizing violence and allowing viewers to fill in the blanks.
Not here. We witness all of what Josephine witnesses from her position behind a tree – the screaming, the struggle, every ghastly step of the rape – as well as Josephine herself; cinematographer Greta Zozula captures both the crime and the child’s cherubic face, shaded by both fear and curiosity, in equally naturalistic light. The arresting sequence makes a necessary point: what is beyond appalling to adults is absolutely baffling to the budding mind of a child – intuitively wrong, yes, but also fascinating, alien. To understand Josephine’s confusion and anger, why she begins to act erratically and aggressively, you need to know exactly what horror she replays in her head, trying to comprehend.
This is admittedly a lot of setup for an exquisitely sensitive film – the standout drama of Sundance so far — that is predominantly about aftermath, with a solid Gemma Chan and a career-best Tatum as her well-meaning but ill-equipped parents. But the intensity of the incident is key, for it underscores the inadequacy of every adult’s response. The police who immediately respond to Damien’s 911 call ignore her, put her in the cop car with the shattered victim (Syra McCarthy) and allow her to see the arrested perpetrator (Philip Ettinger); the camera’s searching gaze – on the woman’s scraped knee, on the man’s near-defiant expression – suggests seared memories. Her mother, sweet and willowy, tries vague platitudes, distractions, psychotherapy (which is inexplicably dropped before any sessions). Her father, a self-described “physical guy”, takes her to self-defense classes. Neither explain to Josephine, who does not know what sex is, what she saw.
De Araújo has a keen ear for the maxims and reflexes parents use to defend themselves – “that will never, ever happen to you”, Damien unhelpfully responds when Josephine asks if it will happen to her. And she manages a tricky balance, between sketching in the stymied adults’ triggered responses, and hewing closely to Josephine, who, in an effectively creepy flourish, sees the man from the park in her room at night, especially after she’s called in a trial witness.
That balances wobbles occasionally, particularly in the film’s overstretched final third. Wordless sequences of Miles Ross’s score, pulsating with Josephine’s unprocessed feelings, lose their potency with time. Chan is not given many notes beyond concern, ranging from mild to abject; brief moments that suggest her personal experience with the subject, such as a car ride in which Josephine asks if she’s ever been raped, are subtle to the point of too understated. But by and large, de Araújo manages to believably steer the bruised family through near-horror into a bravura final courtroom scene. There’s n chilling but thankfully restrained horror to Josephine’s inward retreat, as her inchoate anger boils over in increasingly erratic, alarming ways.
It’s a feat not possible without Reeves – a rare natural, able to both hold her own and disappear into herself – and especially Tatum, whose effortless naturalism somehow still feels underrated and who is simply astonishing as a father far out of his depth. As a movie star, Tatum embodies a certain brand of familiar yet aspirational American masculinity, a hunky, charming everyman. It’s a pleasure, then, to see him take on one of the more fascinating paternal characters in recent memory, a father whose good and bad parenting instincts often coexist within the same sentence, whose confidence in himself and his convictions crumbles in inverse relation with his daughter’s, who must reckon with his own limitations and fear. There’s a beguiling if flawed heart to his Damien – from another actor of his stature, a late-stage scene in which he finally erupts on Josephine could seem menacing, distancing. But Tatum manages to ground the viewer in his abject bewilderment and pain.
It’s a instantly memorable performance in a haunting movie, one that I have carried with me in the hours since I’ve seen it. Perhaps that is the best thing I can say about this remarkable feature – for its viewers, as it is for its meticulously rendered subject, the disquiet lingers.
Josephine is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution
