This year’s Sundance Film Festival — the last in Park City — has drummed up some significant word-of-mouth titles. Gregg Araki’s “I Want Your Sex,” Olivia Wilde’s “The Invite,” and Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer’s “Wicker” have all played to packed-house screenings at the Eccles, attended by buyers from Neon, Searchlight, Netflix, Magnolia, and more distributors seeking acquisitions. But the one movie to have universally rocked the festival, and playing in the U.S. Dramatic Competition, is Beth de Araújo’s intense and gripping thriller “Josephine.”
Starring Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan as parents of an eight-year-old girl (Mason Reeves) who is experiencing trauma and behavioral distress after witnessing a sexual assault in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, “Josephine” marks de Araújo’s second feature after the taut and disturbing 2022 SXSW premiere “Soft and Quiet.” That film, which IndieWire has followed and praised since its origins, used a first-person perspective to engulf us in a meeting of white-supremacist suburban moms who go to violent extremes to make their point. Much of her new film is shot by cinematographer Greta Zozula in first person from the perspective of the young Josephine, who is asked to grapple with and eventually legally testify to a horrifying incident well beyond her understanding.
The film, which premiered Friday afternoon at the over 1,260-seat Eccles, reduced the house to tears and cheers. While Sundance has long been a premier platform for narrative features and documentaries about sexual assault and its fallout, “Josephine” is unique: De Araújo uses at times horror tropes to visualize the story, including even jump scares that reveal the ever-looming presence of the assailant (played by Philip Ettinger of “First Reformed,” and in an astonishing wordless performance) in the small Josephine’s life. Talk to anyone in Park City who’s seen “Josephine,” and everyone is disturbed, haunted, gripped by the film, which spares nothing in realizing the particulars and aftermath of a rape. There were gasps in the audience throughout, and later a rousing standing ovation as the filmmaker and actors arrived onstage.
De Araújo said at the film’s post-screening Q&A that she started writing “Josephine” in 2014, “when I realized something had happened when I was very young that really haunted me. I decided to take a stab at writing about female fear and how that has shaped who I’ve become, and just keep it through the eyes of an eight-year-old the entire time, and what she experiences and how she learns about male aggression, and take fear to the extreme.”
The director, who took the project through the Sundance labs, watched a similar case in court from start to finish in preparing to write the film. In “Josephine,” Damien (Tatum) and his daughter (Reeves) are on a jog through Golden Gate Park when Josephine witnesses a sexual assault, which is shown in harrowing detail. From there, Josephine begins to act out at school and toward her parents, with Reeves delivering what is surely one of the most remarkable child screen performances in years. De Araújo spoke about the casting process at the screening.
‘Josephine’Greta Zozula
“I was at the farmer’s market in San Francisco close to where I grew up, and whenever I’m visiting my parents, we usually go every Sunday. I went with my mom and brought a bunch of flyers. I saw Mason running to buy a bunch of dates for her mom. I said, ‘Who’s your parent?’ And she just looked at me like, ‘Why? Are you getting me in trouble?’ She pointed to her mom, and I walked over to her mom, and when you walk up to someone, and you say, ‘Hi, I’m looking for someone to play the daughter of Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan,’ they’re like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ I said, ‘This is a very real production. I’d love for your daughter to submit a tape.’
De Araújo said she was “blown away” by Mason Reeves’ three auditions. “She just made it very easy for me.” Reeves, onstage at the Q&A, said, “What I liked most [about making the movie] was all of it,” to laughs in the room.
In terms of preparation for the role, Tatum said during the Q&A, “We just started about our own personal life experiences. Parenting now is very different. I have a 12-year-old daughter. How I parent is very different from the way my dad and parents’ parents parented. I took a little bit of both from now and then. We talked very much about how stuff that’s not even in the movie, how we’d probably try to handle it.”
“We were lucky a bit that we got to hang out the three of us before [production],” Chan said at the premiere. “[My character] and Damien have very different points of view, but it’s hard to say whether either is wrong or right.”
Another element that makes “Josephine” such a horrifying rush of a watch is the haunting score by Miles Ross, who also happens to be de Araújo’s partner in real life. “Unfortunately for him, I live with him,” she said. “We worked on finding the sound of the film through production and through early stages of post. I felt really fortunate to be with a composer who cares so much about the project. Before he would sit down to write the music, he would read an essay by Roxane Gay or a chapter by Roxane Gay every single time before he sat down. I really appreciate how much he did the film justice.”
While no buyer has been announced for “Josephine” yet, anticipate a major one for the film along with an awards push. It’s next playing in competition in the Berlinale, though IndieWire understands other festival heads were in attendance at this weekend’s Sundance screenings. Expect to see “Josephine” make a lot of noise this fall, and also for the film to win a major award or more from Sundance’s U.S. Dramatic Competition jurors Janicza Bravo, Nisha Ganatra, and Azazel Jacobs.
The festival runs through February 1.
