Perspective is everything in Beth de Araújo’s Josephine, a stomach-churning drama focused on the loss of innocence and the ill-equipped guidance—both parental and bureaucratic—that can compound enduring trauma. We first meet eight-year-old Josephine (Mason Reeves, in a remarkable debut performance) through her own eyes while heading for early-morning soccer training with her father Damien (Channing Tatum). While this first-person approach is sporadically returned-to, Araújo stays close with her lead character for nearly the entirety of the film. This formal bridge to Josephine’s fragile emotional state—rattled as she witnesses a horrific act and endures the unfathomable aftermath—is the strongest quality of Araújo’s blistering feature, which can hit a snag when such focus is disrupted.
Diverting from her father on their morning run through a San Francisco park, Josephine, from a distance, witnesses a runner (Syra McCarthy) being raped. While the perpetrator (Philip Ettinger) is quickly caught, the experience understandably leads to a world of confusion, frustration, and terror for the young girl. An uncaring police force does the bare minimum, or less, to console. Parents fail to have the necessary vernacular to handle the situation. A justice system cares more about the end result than the detrimental effects of putting a child through the legal wringer. Through emotionally-attentive direction, Araújo is digging into the nuances of how the wrong word––or saying nothing at all––can have irreversible reverberations in the psyche of a still-developing mind. A mother’s realization that her eight-year-old even must be aware of what rape is proves simply heart-wrenching.
It’s also the kind of film that can make you want to scream at the screen. Why are parents prioritizing self-defense classes over seeing a psychologist? Aren’t they aware of their daughter listening in on private conversations about what to do? Araújo seems to be arguing that, in a situation such as this, everyone is out of their element. Tatum, recently impressive in Roofman, further displays his dramatic chops, playing a father with pent-up frustration that he can’t find the right words to ease his daughter’s pain, seeking justice that is only part of the healing process. In a more reserved role, Gemma Chan’s Claire has her daughter’s emotional well-being at the top of mind, hesitant to submerge her into a legal process usually reserved for adults. In her first role and in almost every frame, Reeves is tasked with the film’s emotional pendulum and does astounding work absent of artifice. Running the gamut of authentic, childlike responses, her character playfully reacts when attempting to give a statement while also being completely blank when asked for her name during the trial.
When Araújo divorces the imagery from Josephine’s perspective, the film falters. An extended montage—imbuing specific images with more metaphorical meaning of disconnection and loss related to Claire’s dance performance—feels out of step, as does more ostentatious camerawork, such as a 360-degree shot spinning around a table when a detective first lays out the knotty legal situation. Some of Araújo’s instincts to shock, seen in full force with her nerve-shredding debut Soft & Quiet, crop up around Josephine’s physical acting-out. To watch a child endure such distressing inner turmoil is indeed painful, but there are a few passages wherein Araújo aims to bluntly upset the viewer, doubling down on emotions already clearly established. While these missteps suggest unnecessary detours, the way the director incorporates how Ettinger’s character continues to haunt Josephine’s mind, unbeknownst to those around her, is quite effective.
Primarily shot in shallow focus by cinematographer Greta Zozula (Light from Light), Josephine is a feat of putting the viewer into a protagonist’s headspace, the camera often placed at her eye level, with the sound design mirroring her experience of hearing muffled bits and bobs of adult conversations. In Araújo’s vigorous directorial vision, a heightened sense of anxiety courses through, hinging on the precise ways a girl in mental free-fall, rightfully lacking the words or life experience to find a footing, will react to each daunting new situation. In the end, no matter the verdict reached, an innocent life was irrevocably altered.
Josephine premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.