Content Warning: This article and the film discuss sexual assault, rape, and childhood trauma.
Beth de Araújo made an impression two years ago with her debut feature, Soft & Quiet. That movie dealt with suburban racism in a tense, real-time package. Her follow-up, Josephine, takes a different formal path, though its subject matter is every bit as severe. The drama follows an eight-year-old girl who witnesses a brutal act of sexual violence during a Sunday morning run in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. What follows is an examination of trauma, guilt, and the ways adults fail the young people they intend to protect.
The story opens with Josephine and her father, Damien, during their morning routine. Damien is a dedicated dad who enjoys track runs and playing football with his daughter. He has an energetic, physical personality. Newcomer Mason Reeves plays Josephine with an unforced natural quality. Early on, she races ahead along an isolated trail, ducking behind some trees near a public toilet block. There, she witnesses an adult woman get attacked and raped by a male stranger in a green top.
De Araújo presents this incident plainly. Viewers see the encounter through Josephine’s vantage point. Director of photography Greta Zozula keeps the camera at a child’s eye level, cutting between the event and Josephine’s face. The girl does not have the vocabulary for what she sees. She knows violence and distress, but sexual assault is a totally foreign concept to an elementary school student. When Damien catches up, he chases down the perpetrator, calls the police, and aids in the arrest.
The arrest solves very little for the family. The surviving victim leaves town and drops out of the legal proceedings. Because the prosecutor needs a witness to secure a conviction, the state looks to eight-year-old Josephine to identify the assailant in court. Damien and his wife, Claire, are left with an impossible dilemma.
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Recent headlines across the UK provide an uncomfortable backdrop for this release. The sentencing of Russell Brand to over ten years for rape and sexual assault, alongside the misconduct allegations published against David Walliams, have renewed national arguments over power imbalances, systemic silence, and how society addresses predatory behaviour. Both cases show how long it takes for legal and social accountability to arrive, and how heavy the burden remains on those who speak. In the real world, institutions shield powerful men, while victims carry the distress for decades. Josephine shows how this dynamic operates at the root, watching an entire legal apparatus shift its burden onto an eight-year-old child who has barely learned how to spell the word rape.
The film spends most of its runtime inside the household as Damien and Claire react to Josephine’s behaviour. Damien, played by Channing Tatum, believes in physical preparation and self-reliance. He avoids discussing the assault directly. Instead, he signs his daughter up for self-defence classes, encouraging her to punch and kick. When Josephine asks him what the man was doing to the woman in the bushes, Damien tells her that such things will never happen to her. He views strength as a shield against the horrors of the world. Tatum delivers a subdued, moving performance. His character is a well-meaning father who carries his own memories of childhood abuse, and his physical confidence masks an acute sense of panic.
Gemma Chan plays Claire, a modern dancer who takes an opposing approach. Claire wants her daughter to see a child psychologist. She recognises that silence will not heal an injury of this scale. Chan plays Claire with great dignity and restraint, letting small gestures communicate an internal history with assault that she never states directly. In one scene in the car, Josephine asks her mother if she was ever raped. Claire pauses, offers an evasive answer, and sheds a single tear. The dynamic between the parents fractures as they realise that their instincts do not align.
Read more: Gemma Chan Steers Acclaimed Sundance Winner Josephine Into The Awards Conversation
Josephine’s mental state declines through the middle section of the film. She develops behavioural problems at school, attacking a male classmate after an arm-wrestling contest. She takes her mother’s mobile telephone to look up descriptions of sexual assault on the internet. In the film’s most surreal touch, the attacker, played by Philip Ettinger, begins showing up in Josephine’s bedroom and at the family dinner table. He sits in the corner wearing his green shirt, looking like a quiet ghost. These scenes convey how trauma invades domestic spaces without relying on standard horror movie jump scares.
The film works because Mason Reeves carries the central role with absolute poise. She avoids the theatrical, showy mannerisms common in child performers. Josephine is often sullen, observant, and quietly furious. She watches the adults talk about her case over kitchen counters and through half-open doors, treated as an item of evidence rather than a person in pain.
Sitting through the screening, what struck me most was how physical the silence felt in the cinema. The opening incident hits you squarely in the chest, but the quiet that follows is what really stays with you. We often expect films about trauma to offer speeches, therapeutic breakthroughs, or tearful embraces where everything makes sense. Beth de Araújo refuses that tidy road. Watching Damien run through drills with Josephine feels horribly recognizable as a parent’s desperate attempt to fix an impossible break. Claire’s quiet retreat into herself feels equally real. You walk out of the cinema feeling bruised by their failure to find the right words, yet you understand why those words simply do not exist.
The film screened earlier this year at Sundance, where it collected major festival awards. It avoids easy sentiment, presenting a clear look at how a single morning can shatter a family’s sense of safety. Beth de Araújo has delivered an uncompromising drama that respects the intelligence of its audience and the emotional reality of its characters.
Josephine opens in UK cinemas on 20 November 2026.
