‘Josephine’ Berlinale Review: A Sudden End to Innocence

For an eight-year-old, witnessing an act of violence can be deeply traumatic. In the case of Josephine, the young protagonist of the film that bears her name, that act involves a violent sexual assault. She’s out training with her father, Damien (Channing Tatum), when—thanks to one of the screenplay’s many arbitrary narrative pivots—she becomes separated from him in the middle of the park where they’re running. That’s when she stumbles upon something she doesn’t fully understand, but that clearly shakes her. A man grabs a woman, pushes her to the ground, and pins her there. Josephine may not grasp exactly what’s happening, but the woman’s screams and sobs make it clear that this is a dangerous situation. She hides behind a tree and watches. Her father eventually arrives and, after a police chase, the attacker is arrested.

From that point on, nothing is the same. That much is understandable: the shock of the incident—filmed in very blunt terms by the director—deeply unsettles Josephine (Mason Reeves), who begins to behave erratically, developing fears, bursts of aggression, a fixation on buying a toy gun, or grabbing knives. Her parents, meanwhile, are completely at sea. Damien pushes her to be brave, to train in self-defense, to conquer her fear—but he has no idea how to talk to her about what happened. Her mother, Claire (Gemma Chan), equally helpless, doesn’t know what direction to take either. They’re advised to send her to therapy, but Josephine refuses. On top of that, they can’t seem to agree on anything. And looming over everything is the upcoming trial, for which the girl is the only witness.

Josephine tackles an uncomfortable subject with genuinely disturbing implications. Witnessing something like this at such a young age—without even fully understanding what one is seeing—is undoubtedly traumatic. There are dozens of ways to explore the psychological fallout of an experience like that. The problem is that the film seems interested only in the most dramatic, tense, and dangerous possibilities. There’s no real attempt to engage with the issue’s complexity. It’s as though the filmmaker is just as clumsy as the parents, capable only of piling more and more combustible material onto an already unbearable situation.

That’s why Josephine never quite works as a drama. The focus seems to be on pushing Jo into increasingly strange, violent, and threatening behavior—there are scissors, knives, punches, plastic bags, school fights, all manner of aggression, and even an incident involving jumping from a car that, miraculously, doesn’t end in tragedy—while her parents rack up one mistake after another. Damien is a physical man whose only language is running and training, and who’s completely unequipped to calm his daughter. Claire may appear more emotionally attuned, but she spends most of the film in a kind of stunned paralysis, unable to comfort her or even offer a hug. The parents seem less capable of handling the situation than the child herself—who at least has age as an excuse.

Beyond a willful mise-en-scène that often plays like a horror film—heavy use of subjective POV, unusual camera angles, and an invasive, ever-present suspense score—the film’s main issue lies in a screenplay that seems designed to hurl one impossible conflict after another without ever pausing for breath. In that sense, it feels more like a genre exercise than a drama, the kind of film where potential victims are expected to open precisely the wrong door or wander into precisely the wrong place.

There doesn’t appear to be a single decision made by the protagonists that feels either understandable or correct. And—with the exception of a young woman who helps Jo prepare for the potential trial—neither the authorities nor the police seem to know what they’re doing. In fact, they consistently act against all logic, starting with the detective on the case who tells the terrified child that, even if convicted, the attacker could be released in as little as eight years.

Whether this is the result of sociocultural discomfort, misplaced restraint, or simply a screenplay that thrives on aggravation—endlessly stacking new threats in front of an increasingly confused Jo, who begins to see the man as a ghostly presence—is difficult to say. Without spoiling too much of what follows (or the parents’ frequently baffling choices—beyond their constant arguments in front of her), there are moments when their decisions border on the absurd. And that overload of forced complications ultimately drains the film of both credibility and the unease promised by its premise.

It’s baffling that a film dealing with material this thorny would show so little interest in ambiguity or nuance. Josephine’s situation is undeniably difficult—the actual victim plays only a marginal role here—and it raises important questions about her understanding of intimacy, her perception of men as potentially threatening figures, and even how fear or aggression might shape her future relationship to the world. But those ideas are presented as little more than talking points, and the film never seems to find a more compelling way to dramatize them. A waste, from beginning to end.