Ava DuVernay’s Origin, the pioneering director’s latest confrontation of institutional injustice, starts as it means to go on: with a gut punch that will leave you reeling. Inspired by Isabel Wilkerson’s *Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents—*an eye-opening work of non-fiction which finds connections between the subjugation of African Americans and both the treatment of so-called “untouchables” in the Indian caste system and the “undesirables” in Nazi Germany—the new film, which made its debut at the Venice Film Festival, approaches its subject in a bold and unexpected way. Rather than laying out Wilkerson’s thesis, it centers on the author herself, as embodied by Oscar nominee Aunjanue Ellis—but she isn’t who we see first. It’s Trayvon Martin.
The Black teenager, who was shot by George Zimmerman while walking through the streets of a Florida suburb, and whose death prompted protests and soul searching across the US, is played by the gentle and quietly charming Myles Frost, as he speaks to a friend on the phone and pops into a convenience store to buy some Skittles and iced tea. But soon, he realizes he’s being followed and just as we’re on the cusp of witnessing his tragedy, the camera cuts away.
It’s then that we meet Isabel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who is uncertain about her next step—she’s busy caring for her ailing mother (Emily Yancy) with the help of her husband, Brett (Jon Bernthal), and, when approached to weigh in on the Martin case, worries that she only has questions, not answers. Still, the incident weighs on her and as she listens to a harrowing recording of the call Zimmerman himself made to the police, describing Martin as suspicious, we suddenly jump back to that fateful night and see the latter’s final moments. It’s utterly terrifying without resorting to sensationalism, and the single gunshot, when it finally comes, is heart-stopping—even more so because, by this point, we hadn’t been expecting to see it.
But it’s not this experience that prompts Isabel to engage with the topic—it’s two other, equally devastating but more personal losses. One night, Brett collapses and is pronounced dead, and soon after, Isabel’s mother follows. Isabel’s life shatters and, in an effort to fill the void, she throws herself back into research and begins to draw a line between the rules, restrictions, and expectations historically placed upon Black communities and those imposed on Indian Dalits and the perceived enemies of Hitler’s regime. The people in Isabel’s life, from her editor (Vera Farmiga) to her voluble and hilarious cousin, Marion (Niecy Nash), initially fail to see the parallels, but she remains convinced that they’re there, and journeys to Berlin and later Delhi to debate with academics, friends, and acquaintances.
These intellectually rigorous portions of Origin are a mind-expanding thrill, and the film soars when it grapples with the more thorny aspects of its subject matter. In one early sequence, before Isabel’s family is taken from her, her mother wonders if Martin would’ve survived had he not been walking down “a white street.” “Are you saying it was the boy’s fault?” Isabel replies. Of course not, says her mother, but it’s something white people find intimidating, and so should be avoided. She asks Brett to back her up, and he gently replies that while that may be true, we can’t live our lives avoiding things other people might find intimidating. She looks at him closely and grumbles, “Sure you can.” It’s a wonderfully nuanced and revealing moment, as is the scene where Isabel wonders why Zimmerman, a Latino man, felt so compelled to “protect” a white neighbourhood; or where she speaks to a Jewish woman who seems offended by the comparisons she’s attempting to draw; or interacts with a MAGA hat-wearing plumber, whom she writes off but then seems to change her mind about.
The revelations that arise as a result of her investigation—from how the Nazis took inspiration from Jim Crow laws, to Martin Luther King Jr.’s meditations on civil rights in relation to the Indian caste system, as printed in Ebony magazine—are stunning, too. They build up effectively to Isabel’s return to the US, as she knuckles down into writing Caste, determined to follow Marion’s advice in making her case as plainly as possible. As a result, the film’s presentation of her ideas, like the finished book itself, is both thorough and accessible, and the anticipation builds as she lays out her argument on whiteboards and notes in an extended montage that has the quiet power and bristling tension of Spotlight.
It’s when Origin dispenses with this level of restraint, though, that it stumbles. While dramatizing Isabel’s life proves affecting, the film is less successful when recreating the historical accounts she reads that feed into the writing of Caste: the tale of August Landmesser (Finn Wittrock), a German who refused to perform the Nazi salute on account of having fallen for a Jewish woman, Irma Eckler (Victoria Pedretti); the work of Black anthropologists Allison and Elizabeth Davis (Isha Blaaker and Jasmine Cephas Jones), who went undercover in the Jim Crow-era South to examine its stringent social structures; and the biography of Indian social reformer B. R. Ambedkar, a Dalit himself who became a vocal champion of the lower castes.
These stories are undoubtedly moving, but they’re told in broad strokes with no time or space to get under the skin of the people they depict. It doesn’t help, either, that the characters in the south speak in a stilted, old-timey style, or that some of the Germans, including Nazi officers, are made to speak in heavily accented English. The goal seems to be to make Caste’s concepts more easily digestible, but the effect is a little crude, at points even a little like an after-school special, in a way that isn’t worthy of the rest of the film. You find yourself thinking that had Origin avoided the reenacted interludes entirely, in favor of Isabel simply recounting these tales, it would’ve felt far more compelling.
However, there are two notable exceptions in which subtlety is disregarded with extraordinary results. One is the story of a young Black boy who goes to a public pool in ’50s Ohio with his all-white baseball team to celebrate a big win. At first, he’s barred from entering, and made to sit alone behind a fence and watch his friends frolic in the water. Then, when they complain, he is finally allowed in, everyone else is made to get out of the water, and the child is cautiously towed around the pool on a float and repeatedly told not to touch the water. It’s a truly harrowing scene that culminates with Isabel’s regret at not having had the chance to interview this subject herself before his death. She imagines lying down on the grass with him face to face, and wonders if a part of him died that day. The other sequence is one in which a Dalit man is made to dive into a sewer, as higher caste men continue to use the toilet cubicles above him. It’s disgusting and distressing, but such a brutal and arresting image—and a stark, urgent reminder that things like this continue to happen every day—that you can’t look away.
Both sequences had me choked up and, from where I was sitting in my screening, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. I expect it’ll be the same in cinemas, once Origin arrives later this year. This is a film which asks each and every one of its viewers to turn inwards; to think about our own lives, actions, assumptions, and biases; about how our behavior might be upholding a destructive system and what we could do to dismantle it. Yes, the ending—in which Isabel walks past the historical figures who’ve inspired her—is too literal; the sweeping score is often too sentimental and insistent; and it sometimes feels like a history lesson, but, frankly, it’s one that we all need and one that has the potential to make us all better people.
