Films shot from a first-person perspective are a precarious business. There are interesting failures: few cared for Lady in the Lake, Robert Montgomery’s experimental 1947 Philip Marlowe film; Hardcore Henry, Ilya Naishuller’s 2015 action movie, fared slightly better with audiences, leaning into the grammar of first-person-shooter video games.
The writer and director RaMell Ross takes an unprecedented gamble with his debut feature, using a gimmick better (yet not ideally) suited to gumshoes and assassins, to bring Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Nickel Boys to the big screen. It takes a while for the eyes to adjust to the methodology and to Jomo Fray’s cinematography.
Elwood (Ethan Herisse) is a bright, loving black teenager growing up in Jim Crow Florida with his grandma (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) at an exciting historical moment dominated by Martin Luther King, civil-rights marches and Apollo missions. Inspired by a caring teacher (Jimmie Fails), he enrols in community college and is headed to campus when he accepts a lift in the wrong car.
He is sent to Nickel Academy, a reformatory based on Florida’s notorious Dozier School for Boys, where he befriends the cynical Turner (Brandon Wilson) and slowly realises the extent of the sexual and physical abuse within the institution.
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Ross won acclaim and a major prize at Sundance for his experimental 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening. Nickel Boys is no less daring, switching between its first-person views, sometimes replaying the same sequence, to fashion an entirely new kind of cinema. You have never seen anything quite like it.
But the formal pizzazz proves less important than the film’s emotional impact. A series of indelible images coalesce into a powerful chronicle of institutional abuse and racial inequality. The troubled faces around the ring at a rigged boxing match and the moment when Elwood’s grandma hugs Turner in his stead are as heartbreaking as they are unforgettable.
In cinemas from Friday, January 3rd
