The Most Acclaimed Movie of the Fest is a Tough Watch

PLOT: An eight-year-old girl witnesses a violent rape in Golden Gate Park.

REVIEW: Of all the movies playing at the Sundance Film Festival this year, none has inspired more buzz than Josephine. Having already swept the festival’s awards, winning the narrative Grand Jury Prize and the main audience award, it seems likely to be acquired by a high-end distributor, with an awards run imminent.

Certainly, Josephine is a challenging film, with it following our child protagonist (played by an incredible Mason Reeves) as she loses her child’s sense of wonder and curiosity in an instant, when, after running too far ahead of her father (Channing Tatum) on a Sunday morning jog, she witnesses a rape. The way the sexual assault is shown doesn’t spare the audience anything, with the camera taking the POV of Josephine, who watches the entire act, not quite knowing what she’s seeing. Director Beth de Araújo devastatingly doesn’t shy away from its grotesque violence, but it’s only the start of what is often a difficult-to-watch film, albeit an important one.

While it benefits from terrific performances from Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan as Josephine’s parents, this is a showcase for Reeves, whose performance is an all-timer for child actors. Movies have a tendency to make their child-protagonists overly precocious, but Josephine comes off as a real child, with the behavioural problems that emerge from her trauma believable – even if they sometimes put her in a harsh light. Not quite knowing what she’s seen, Josephine starts acting out after the assault, often spitting in people’s faces (mimicking what her father does after him and the police catch the rapist), and lashing out violently. In one shocking scene, she even punches her pregnant mother in the stomach.

What de Araújo is showing here is the full fallout of the crime that’s been committed, with the rapist (played by Phillip Ettinger) becoming a silent spectre that follows Josephine around in her imagination. What makes things arguably worse for Josephine is that the traumatized victim refuses to be a witness in the criminal case, leaving it to Josephine to testify – an act which traumatizes her all over again.

Indeed, Josephine will no doubt become a hot-button movie once it gets a general release, as it is unsparing in how difficult it is to prosecute a rape, especially in the climax, where Josephine is subjected to a brutal cross-examination. Tatum delivers another great performance as Josephine’s father, who is dealing with his own trauma, as he feels guilt for not being able to keep her from seeing the crime and intervening earlier. He plays the role of loving but also frustrated, with the crime having some fallout in his marriage as well. Chan, as Josephine’s mother, has been a victim of a sexual assault herself and is at odds with him over whether the girl should testify or not, something which frays an initially idyllic marriage.

The only problem with Josephine as a film is that its too often clinical approach makes it a hard watch. Josephine clearly comes from a loving home, but there are no real scenes of warmth depicted after the rape, and the movie rarely veers from hopelessness. It’s like Die My Love in that way, in that it’s so depressing that it occasionally feels like an endurance test. Even still, Josephine is a film that demands to be seen as it asks a lot of worthy questions, such as why sexual assaults are so rarely prosecuted (and when they are, the jail sentences are minimal) and what duty, if any, a child like Josephine has in seeing that justice is done. It’s a harsh film, but a necessary one.