Luce

Tense and keeps you guessing, but somehow the stakes never seem so high as to justify the level of intensity. Great performances, great dialogue, and thought provoking racial commentary make it worth seeing though.

A slightly repetitive, but nonetheless fascinating societal drama that rewards concentration

One of my key concerns with Luce_, and intertwined with exploring identity, is exploring power – who has it, who doesn't, and how our institutions uphold the rigid systems of power that disadvantage certain demographics. So much of the dialogue in our culture right now is about confronting systems of power that disenfranchise women, the LGBTQIA community, people of colour, people with disabilities, and a myriad of other marginalised groups. Luce explores how life can be experienced by those_ on the receiving end of exploitative and unfair power dynamics.

• Julius Onah; Press Notes

Trump's America, such as it is, is a place where the intolerance, xenophobia, and hatred that once existed in the shadows, now proudly parades around in daylight, a red baseball cap on its head, an American flag draped around its shoulders. As a result, issues such as race, gender, and class have become more incendiary topics than they've been in years. It's a house divided against itself, and it's the setting for Luce, a film which examines a myriad of these issues. Adapted from the play of the same name by J.C. Lee, Luce was written for the screen by Lee and Julius Onah, and directed by Onah. Tackling all manner of hot-button issues, including race, class, gender, power, privilege, #MeToo, academic achievement, stereotypes, liberal elitism, even revolutionary rhetoric and the importance of language in encoding societal/political power structures, it also works as a thriller about a young man who may, or may not, be a dangerous sociopath posing as the embodiment of the American Dream. Without question it asks a lot of the audience, not just in terms of meeting it halfway in an ideological sense, but also in more fundamental narrative terms – the film's core is a puzzle that can only be fully resolved by reading between the lines. And there are a hell of a lot of lines, mean...

Kelvin Harrison Jnr treads the line between perfect student and perfect demon with some aplomb in this film. Naomi Watts and Tim Roth also provide a credible set of parents facing problems with both their (adopted) son and with their own relationship. Octavia Spencer stands out too - but I have to say, I don't find there to be much cohesion here. Certainly, the threads address issues of racial and gender stereotyping, but they don't intertwine in any particularly convincing way. I had to make quite a number of assumptions to make any sense of the ending - perhaps that was the plan - but it left me feeling a little dissatisfied, even frustrated. Maybe there is to be a "Luce (ends) 2"?

Defying simple categorization, the film unfolds with the menace of a horror movie while remaining a character-driven drama. This slow-burn thriller relies on explosive dialogue and ambiguous expressions rather than action, keeping the audience uneasy and guessing until the final frame. Parents be well advised that this movie contains nudity involving a scene in which Marsha Stephanie Blake's hairy vagina is shown at length when she strips nude in public.