Gemma Chan<\/a> 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\u2019s response. The police who immediately respond to Damien\u2019s 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\u2019s searching gaze \u2013 on the woman\u2019s scraped knee, on the man\u2019s near-defiant expression \u2013 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 \u201cphysical guy\u201d, takes her to self-defense classes. Neither explain to Josephine, who does not know what sex is, what she saw.<\/p>\nDe Ara\u00fajo has a keen ear for the maxims and reflexes parents use to defend themselves \u2013 \u201cthat will never, ever happen to you\u201d, Damien unhelpfully responds when Josephine asks if it will happen to her. And she manages a tricky balance, between sketching in the stymied adults\u2019 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\u2019s called in a trial witness.<\/p>\n
That balances wobbles occasionally, particularly in the film\u2019s overstretched final third. Wordless sequences of Miles Ross\u2019s score, pulsating with Josephine\u2019s 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\u2019s ever been raped, are subtle to the point of too understated. But by and large, de Ara\u00fajo manages to believably steer the bruised family through near-horror into a bravura final courtroom scene. There\u2019s n chilling but thankfully restrained horror to Josephine\u2019s inward retreat, as her inchoate anger boils over in increasingly erratic, alarming ways.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a feat not possible without Reeves \u2013 a rare natural, able to both hold her own and disappear into herself \u2013 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\u2019s 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\u2019s, who must reckon with his own limitations and fear. There\u2019s a beguiling if flawed heart to his Damien \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a instantly memorable performance in a haunting movie, one that I have carried with me in the hours since I\u2019ve seen it. Perhaps that is the best thing I can say about this remarkable feature \u2013 for its viewers, as it is for its meticulously rendered subject, the disquiet lingers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Josephine, the titular character of Beth de Ara\u00fajo\u2019s stunning second feature, is eight years old. Played by equally…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":428374,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,206],"class_list":["post-428373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=428373"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428373\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/428374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=428373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=428373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=428373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}