New York film festival
Adaptation of Whitehead’s novel about two young friends trapped by institutional abuse is told with piercing beauty by RaMell Ross
RaMell Ross’s transcendentally moving and frightening film, adapted from the 2019 novel by Colson Whitehead, runs at least initially on a kind of cognitive dissonance. Its ecstatic, first-person images of childhood experience might point to happy memories, or possibly free-floating sensory epiphanies for which happiness or unhappiness is not relevant – and time-lapse shots here of the night sky incidentally reminded me of Ross’s lovely 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening.
But these memories, presented as such by enigmatic flashforward scenes, have tragedy encoded within them. There are however wonderful moments of humanity and hope; I don’t usually respond to “hug” moments in drama: and yet the (soon to be classic) scene here in which a woman has to hug her grandson’s friend in the absence of the grandson himself is overwhelming.
