OVERVIEW
For 8-year-old Josephine, training at the park with her dad at 6 a.m. is routine, until one morning she runs ahead and witnesses something that changes her life. In her second feature, director Beth de Araújo follows the young girl’s perspective, focusing on the aftermath and examining how trauma transforms a child’s perception of the world. The film is as much about what she saw as it is about what the adults around her, including her parents and the justice system, do not know how to fix.
BACKGROUND
One of the most talked-about films at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, Josephine won both the U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award. It is an extremely personal project for writer-director Beth de Araújo, built from a childhood memory she has publicly discussed. The screenplay was developed with support from the Sundance Institute through the Screenwriters Lab and Directors Lab, and the project took years to come together, due to pandemic-related delays.
EXECUTION
It is a harsh, unsettling film because it refuses to soften the experience of being a child who has seen something she cannot process. Its biggest accomplishment is how firmly it commits to Josephine’s point of view, using a clever device to show how the moment stays with her, while the camera’s constant movement keeps you trapped in her new, uneasy way of reading the world.
That commitment is also what makes the best material land. The film does not rush Josephine back to normal. School feels different. Her home feels different. Even the way she sees her parents’ relationship shifts. The movie is at its best in these moments because it captures what “normal” looks like for her now and how what she experienced will follow her long after childhood. Mason Reeves is so convincing that you catch yourself worrying about the actress herself. Her presence is so strong that it becomes easy to overlook the film’s flaws elsewhere.
But it becomes less sure of itself the moment Josephine’s face is no longer dominating the frame. One issue is that it shows what she saw directly, so bluntly that it undercuts the story’s greatest strength. Instead of letting us piece together how Josephine understands it, the film gives us an image that answers too much, too soon, shifting the experience from inside her head to outside it.
The bigger problem is how the adult world is written. The film aims for a bigger critique of how adults, including institutions, are not equipped to handle a child’s trauma. I buy that as a theme. I just do not buy every choice the screenplay makes to get there. You can feel the script steering toward specific beats, and the adults are often pushed into place to hit them.
The parents, in particular, make decisions that feel inconsistent from scene to scene, or even downright irresponsible, not because the film is exploring their flaws, but because the plot needs Josephine to be in a certain situation. There is a moment, for example, when Josephine runs from her mother’s car in public. But to make room for a conversation between Josephine and her father, he is the one who ends up finding her. Did the mother simply stop searching halfway?
Similarly blunt choices recur in the legal scenes, especially in the defense attorney’s questions to Josephine. The writing is so caricatural that any attempt to analyze a faulty justice system is thrown out the window.
Even small procedural choices kept pulling me out. The police response, in particular, felt oddly incurious, as if they would not even register the obvious signs of harm right in front of them. The most glaring example, though, is how the parents raise the possibility of therapy for Josephine and then drop it with surprising ease. I understand the story is set in an earlier time, when therapy may not have been as common, but the way it is introduced so naturally and dismissed so quickly makes it hard to take seriously.
Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan do what they can with the material, playing confusion and helplessness in a restrained way. But even their own conversations and interactions with other adults lack credible adult behavior.
Finally, the film sometimes seems overly aware of its own awards prospects, especially in how it frames Tatum. There are a few moments staged like ready-made “Oscar clip” scenes, with the camera locked in as he pushes for a big dramatic beat, shifting attention from Josephine’s experience to the performance being showcased. He is good, and his dramatic talents are there (though I would argue his best performance is still Magic Mike), but the emphasis can feel like a secondary agenda that distracts from the film’s most distinctive strength: staying within a child’s perspective.
AFTERTASTE
Josephine is touching and often fantastic when Mason Reeves dominates the frame, giving an authentically powerful performance as a young girl trying to move on from something she cannot fully understand. That same subtlety and realism are harder to find elsewhere in the film. I kept being pulled out whenever the story shifted to the adults, who often act awkwardly and flatten the more complex discussions the film is trying to explore.