‘Color Book’ Netflix Review: A Quiet, Humanist Journey Through Grief and Fatherhood

With an admirable simplicity and a style that evokes both classical neorealism and its later reinterpretations, Color Book is a small but deeply affecting film about a father and son—one that feels especially fitting around Father’s Day. It tells a modest story, reminiscent in spirit of David Lynch’s The Straight Story, using honest, unadorned means to move the viewer without ever resorting to emotional manipulation. Strikingly austere by Netflix standards—shot in black and white and featuring no recognizable stars—David Fortune’s debut feature, fresh off a successful festival run, is a warm, humanist portrait of the pleasures and challenges that define the bond between a father and his child.

Lucky (William Catlett) is the father of Mason (Jeremiah Daniels), an eleven-year-old boy with Down syndrome. Early on, we learn that Mason’s mother has just passed away, leaving Lucky as his sole caregiver. At the funeral, it becomes clear that the loss extends beyond the family—it reverberates through an entire community that deeply loved her. For Lucky, who likely relied heavily on her in caring for their son, the shift is profound. Life with Mason is tender and meaningful, but it also brings a set of responsibilities he’s unaccustomed to shouldering on his own.

Grief compounds everything. Lucky is navigating not only the practical demands of parenting, but also the emotional weight of loss. Mason, for his part, continues to wait for his mother and struggles to adjust to his father’s different way of doing things. Still, theirs is not a conflict-driven relationship. Mason is gentle, quiet, and affectionate. The distance between them is subtle, more a matter of disconnection than discord. That begins to change when Lucky accepts a friend’s offer of tickets to a baseball game and decides to make the trip across the suburbs of Atlanta with his son. That journey—full of complications—becomes the film’s narrative spine.

What unfolds is a series of small-scale misadventures, shaped by a minimalist, neorealist logic—one that recalls not only Italian cinema of the 1950s but also later echoes in Iranian film. There are shades of Abbas Kiarostami’s The Traveler and, for reasons that gradually become clear, Jafar Panahi’s The White Balloon. A broken-down car, a string of misunderstandings, a desire the boy insists on and the father resists—the journey slowly tangles itself into a chain of events that unfold without haste, but with steady momentum.

Plot twists are, in a sense, beside the point. Color Book isn’t interested in suspense, nor does it rely on hollow narrative hooks. Yes, complications arise, but Fortune never pushes the characters into real danger. These turns serve a different purpose: to gently rebuild a bond fractured by absence. Thematically, the film may bring to mind the recent My Father’s Shadow, while stylistically it feels closer to an earlier era of American indie cinema—stripped of affectation, free of stylistic gimmicks, and grounded in a direct, observational mode.

Shot in luminous black and white by cinematographer Nikolaus Summerer, with a sparse jazz score that underscores rather than dictates emotion, the film also offers a quietly lyrical portrait of Atlanta’s working-class suburbs. Color Book is, above all, a film of details: the notebook that gives it its title, the fleeting encounters along the way, the rituals of daily life—cooking, saying prayers before bed, brushing teeth. It’s through these small gestures that the film builds its emotional resonance.

In the midst of Netflix’s typically louder, more spectacle-driven offerings, Color Book stands as a welcome anomaly—a modest, intimate work that carves out space for independent cinema within the heart of the mainstream. A gentle film, but one that lingers.