Josephine

We start eight-year-old Josephine’s (Mason Reeves) day from inside her head in Peep Show style, as a game played with her dad Damien (Channing Tatum) plays out from a first person point-of-view. He’s outside the garage, encouraging her to push the door button and then run and jump over the door censor to get out without hitting her head in the process.

“Being scared does you no good at all,” he tells her. The whole film is, at least on one level, about how true that statement is. Those of you who are scared of spoilers, meanwhile, would be well advised to approach the rest of this review with caution as some plot detail is necessary in order to discuss the film.

It’s early and dad and daughter are going for a run that has the easy camaraderie of a regular event, until she puts on a spurt and the pair of them accidentally take different forks in the road. Jo comes up short as she sees a woman (Syra McCarthy) run from a man (Philip Ettinger), who then brutally rapes her as we flick between what she can see and Jo herself, shocked into stasis.

It’s hard enough for adult witnesses to process traumatic events and writer/director Beth de Araújo asks us how much harder, then, must it be for little Jo, who doesn’t even know what the word “rape” means. She may not have the vocabulary for it but she feels the trauma, with the spectre of the attacker starting to simply hang out in her bedroom and other places. This isn’t played for horror in the genre sense by de Araújo but it is just as chilling to think about, his presence not used as a jump scare but as an uneasy stomach flip. Just another way that de Araújo – who drew on her own childhood experience for this – nudges us into the world as the little girl sees it.

As pressure starts to mount for Jo to testify in court, her behaviour starts to reflect the stress, with her worried dancer mother Claire (Gemma Chan) and dad at odds over what to do about it. Claire thinks talking would be best but Damien takes a work-it-out-physically approach to problems. De Araújo isn’t in the business of saying either is completely wrong exactly but in their conflict over what to do, Jo’s experience is marginalised.

De Araújo is particularly good at evoking the emotional turmoil Jo feels, encapsulated in an elegantly edited sequence that combines her mother onstage with other elements, so that we feel the connection Jo makes, far away from the adult perspective. The winner of Sundance’s US Dramatic Competition Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award shows not only the threat that Jo feels, but the threat that she might become to others as a result of her fears. Reeves is a real discovery, bringing a volatile mix of emotions to Jo as she tries to process what has happened as well as the conflicting advice she is receiving from the adults. The director showed with her debut Soft & Quiet that she is adept at making an audience feel discomfort, and does so again here. In a film that is all about perspective, in the end a shift in one provides hope.

Reviewed on: 31 Jan 2026