How often do you watch something so original, it changes the way you think about image construction itself? Colson Whitehead’s source novel – winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – was widely regarded as ‘unfilmable’ due to heartbreaking twists that surely could not be translated to the screen. And yet Ross has done so using techniques that pose questions about the way cinema has represented racially-motivated violence.
The place is Florida in the early 1960s. Jim Crow segregation is thriving despite civil rights actions and the rise of a charismatic young preacher named Martin Luther King. Elwood (Ethan Herisse) is a quiet, bright and idealistic student whose path to an all Black college is cut short when he hitches a ride with the wrong man. The open road of his future becomes a dead end as he is yanked from a loving home shared with grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) and into a segregated reform school for boys.
Director and co-writer RaMell Ross has an uncanny ability to lead viewers into an image that turns out to be a narratively significant trick of the eye. The Nickel Academy where Elwood is taken in the back of a police car is all leafy, spacious grounds, for this is how its gatekeepers want it to be seen.
Miraculously, Nickel Boys goes against the grain of its own devastating trajectory
Schoolmaster Spencer (Hamish Linklater – pure evil) explains the route to graduation is to play by the rules. Meanwhile life is lessons, chores and staying out of the way of bullies. Hattie has engaged a lawyer and Elwood believes that justice will soon be done. We see through his eyes, literally. Cinematographer Jomo Fray films from his point-of-view and it is not until Elwood makes a friend in Turner (Brandon Wilson) that the point-of-view camerawork switches and we see Herisse’s face for the first time.
Rather than a gimmick, this mode of shooting keeps our affinity with Elwood and Turner, while nulling the perspective of their thuggish violators. Ross slowly feeds in the truth of what is happening at Nickel under the cover of darkness, weaponising the sound design and stray details without ever subjecting his beloved boys to on-screen violence. Meanwhile, events in a future timeline add another layer to the film’s commentary on how lives are erased by racist institutions and the painful and forensic human labour required to unearth their bones.
This is Ross’s first fiction feature and its power comes as no surprise to those familiar with his 2018 calling card of a documentary. Hale County, This Morning This Evening announced a gifted photographer driven by sensitivity to his subjects’ dignity. Accordingly, Nickel Boys miraculously goes against the grain of the story’s devastating trajectory by leading with the same loving eye.
In US theaters now. Out in UK and Ireland cinemas Jan 3, 2025.