James Y. Lee
Content warning: This review of “Josephine” will be dealing with sensitive subjects, including psychological trauma experienced by children, as well as sexual assault. Reader discretion is advised.
Right from the jump, I want to make one thing clear; as much I firmly believe that Beth de Araújo’s Josephine is the strongest standout of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, I cannot, in good conscience, actively recommend that people watch this film. I have a hard time believing this to be the kind of film that audiences should walk into freely—and I would especially advise parents of young children to exercise an incredible degree of caution if they would choose to view this film. The fundamental utility of a review is for readers to use it to determine if a given piece of art is worth the time they would take to experience it. In the case of Josephine, I would seriously ask readers to wonder what kind of art they deem to be “worth” that time, and what they would seek out of a piece of art so that the time they put into it can yield some kind of emotional, personal, or otherwise edifying return.
Those familiar with Beth de Araújo’s so-far-brief line of work are likely aware—especially from her white-supremacist-centering debut feature, Soft and Quiet (2022)—that this is a director unflinching in her conviction to stare down unfathomably dark corners of human consciousness and behavior. But with Josephine, two things have changed in how she approaches said corners. One—where Soft and Quiet voyeuristically and crudely portrayed the perpetrators of unfettered cruelty, Josephine instead takes a more humanistic and empathetic approach towards those who pay witness to that cruelty. And two—that witness is not an adult, but an eight-year-old child, modeled after de Araújo’s own personal experiences.
When de Araújo was only eight years old, she witnessed a horrific crime with her father while out at the Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Only when she entered her 20s, around 2014, did she begin to endeavor to process the consequences of that witnessing, enough for her to write the first draft of Josephine. The film that’s resulted out of the ensuing creative process wastes no time and spares no detail in portraying what that crime was.
In the very first scene of the film, eight-year-old Josephine (newcomer Mason Reeves) prepares to go on a run in Golden Gate Park right next to her family home with her father, Damien (Channing Tatum), who’s pointedly giving her a safety lesson on how to run into the garage while the door is closing in case she encounters an emergency she needs to take shelter from as soon as possible. As they soon start running, Josephine gets ahead of Damien—too far ahead, as she eventually runs down a path in a fork in the trail that Damien doesn’t notice, who goes instead down the other path.
In the minutes that Josephine is alone, she watches a runner (Syra McCarthy) making her way into a public restroom in the park, before out of nowhere, a man (First Reformed‘s Philip Ettinger) enters the restroom and immediately begins sexually assaulting her. Viewer discretion is strongly advised for those who intend on viewing this film. The rape in question is depicted on-screen in extremely graphic detail from start to finish. It is unfathomably horrifying to watch, and its depiction comes with legitimate narrative purpose for what’s to come.
As adult audience members, the terror of seeing the assault so closely is in an already established and learned awareness of how completely abhorrent an act of violence it is. But knowing that an eight-year-old child is witnessing as well brings the horror of the scene to an entirely new level—Josephine does not have the faculties or the vocabulary to even begin to understand what is unfolding in front of her eyes, and just how violating and terrifying it actually is.
What unfolds is perhaps the single most frightening psychological portrayal of how trauma like this can fracture a child’s sense of safety, and how they begin to internalize violent, impulsive behaviors as a means of protecting themselves. With Josephine, Beth de Araújo has built a formally rigorous, immersive look into just how thorough that shattering of security is for her titular character, and it initially takes the form of small details that accumulate into an unshakeable air of dread.
They’re heard in passively snide remarks said to Josephine at the time of the rapist’s eventual arrest by the police—which she then repeats to her parents. They’re seen in how, while shopping for a birthday present, Josephine immediately reaches for a toy gun resembling an assault rifle, and how she looks for sharp objects at any given opportunity. They’re felt in a misspelled Google search for “rape” that opens up a rabbit hole of profanities that Josephine then deploys onto her unsuspecting classmates.
And perhaps, most heartbreakingly, they’re embodied in the fact that Josephine now imagines the rapist as a figure in the same space as her, everywhere she goes. Ettinger doesn’t portray the rapist as an excessively aggressive presence in these imaginings, which feels harrowingly consistent with how someone as young as Josephine would likely picture him. He just wanders around or remains still, mouth slightly slackened and agape, with a strange childlike energy threateningly, unsettlingly juxtaposed by the terrible crime we know Josephine has seen him commit.
From there, Beth de Araújo’s film unfolds into a lot of things: how the failures of parents to protect their children can be so alienating and helpless, how young girls are introduced far too early to a world of masculine aggression and conditioned into fearing it, how the American legal system is destined to fail victims of rape and those who would stand up to help them, and so on. To the former-most point, Gemma Chan (playing Claire, Josephine’s mother) and Channing Tatum are utterly heartbreaking as Josephine’s parents, two figures attempting to convey to her the right lessons and answers in a situation that is completely devoid of them to begin with.
Claire is intent on shielding Josephine from the legal procedures and confrontational conversations that would force Josephine to relive the assault she witnessed, while the emotionally illiterate Damien, try as he may to show Josephine the need of defending herself in a world full of horrible people, winds up leading her down a path of spite, vengeance, and violence in a way he never could have foreseen. Their every action is borne out of a desire to help Josephine readjust to the world—and yet their ensuing conflict and inability to console Josephine, to “fix” the unfairness of the world for her, only drives her further and further down a path of fear, confusion, and anger.
As Josephine becomes the only remaining witness willing to testify about the rape in order to put the rapist in jail, the back half of de Araújo’s film hones in on how woefully ill-equipped the American legal system is to support someone like her through such a harrowing time. A series of questions asked by the police and associated psychologists reveal both the infrastructure set in place to try and speak to children about crimes, as well as how ineffective they seem at actually providing Josephine meaningful psychological consolation.
Meanwhile, an impressively telegraphed one-take courtroom scene towards the film’s conclusion firmly traps us in Josephine’s point of view while also shining a blinding spotlight on the monstrosity of how legal procedures are designed to protect male rapists and pressure witnesses and victims into stasis. Eventually, Josephine learns to fear masculinity in virtually all of its forms, as the encounter of one man’s abhorrent actions quickly metastasizes into a yes-all-men paranoia that Josephine can’t help but understandably lash out against in response, and at certain points, to unbelievably disturbing results.
Mason Reeves’s work as the film’s titular character remains one of the most astonishing child actor discoveries of the past few years. It’s a role whose most traumatic details I can only hope Beth de Araújo’s team thoroughly shielded and protected her from, as Reeves devastatingly toes the line of a girl who can’t help but express her innocence while it steadily gets torn from her with both each retraumatization and each step down the abattoir of the legal system. In particular, embodying her perspective with unbelievable adherence to claustrophobia and subjectivity is director of photography Greta Zozula’s incredible cinematography, the most apparent and potent formal trick up de Araújo’s sleeve.
In one scene, Zozula’s camera spins at the center of a table while Josephine roams around her parents arguing over the terms of her collaboration in the case with a detective, joined by the rapist’s apparition wandering around and eating cookies off a plate. In another, it’s as though we’re trapped in Josephine’s perspective as she fails to even state her name for the court in her initial attempt to testify, with incredibly shallow depth of field, shaky handheld camerawork, and oblique angles that barely help to make out anyone else in the courtroom from her eyes.
All of this makes for a deeply horrifying experience based on a profound sense of empathy for Josephine’s experience—with only few sparing moments of levity, and a note of hope at the end that feels profoundly tenuous and uncertain, anyway. Watching Beth de Araújo’s film, I remained utterly helpless in thought about the trauma that young children are bound to experience from the horrors of this abominable country, because of how unabashedly those horrors are being displayed on the internet. I thought of how generations of children going forward will have their innocences robbed from them by traumatic sights delivered to them on a silver platter by a government of violently masculine criminals they are being led to believe they should trust, who will gleefully rip open the abyssal darkness of the world far younger than these children are able or willing to comprehend it.
I thought of how, midway through my five-day visit to Sundance, Alex Pretti was viciously, callously slaughtered by ICE agents who fired more than ten bullets into his back, and how, moments later, I saw that the Sesame Street Instagram account posted a guide for how to comfort children in “scary times.” I thought of what that post said, about how parents of children Josephine’s age should “listen carefully and assure them these feelings are normal, and adults feel them too,” as if those parents are able to articulate these truly incomprehensible terrors to even themselves, as if they don’t need comforting from such horror in their own right.
And yet, as the credits rolled, I also thought, for once, that a world as unforgivably horrific as this is not worth quietly accepting. I thought that for the sake of our children, for the sake of the parents who will raise them, who graciously brought them into this world out of a brazenly courageous faith for any kind of future at all, we have long since moved past the time where we can conceive of this horror as acceptable.
