Josephine, Beth de Araújo’s sophomore feature, follows an 8-year-old girl (Mason Reeves) who experiences something awful. While running ahead of her dad Damien (Channing Tatum), she sees a woman being violently raped by a stranger. Her father arrives on the scene too late to prevent the rape, but not too late to call the police so they can apprehend the man.
Josephine has now been exposed to sex for presumably the first time, under the worst of possible circumstances. She asks her father, “What was that man doing to her?” Damien, faced with an impossible parenting situation, chooses the wrong answer. He attempts to distract her and minimize what she has experienced, hoping the problem just goes away. They spend the day together, reuniting with her mother Claire (Gemma Chan). As Claire and Damien joke around at a department store, Josephine demands her father buy her a toy weapon and has a meltdown.
Despite the film primarily concerning itself with Josephine’s response to the trauma she has experienced, it feels a lot more eventful than a typical psychological drama. After the violence the film begins with, it feels like it is always teetering on the edge of more violence, or things entirely spiraling out of control. It highlights the unpredictability of both the world and the behavior of children.
Child actors are often asked to portray emotions that they might experience on an everyday basis, and can often give quite good, naturalistic performances on that basis. But here, Mason Reeves is in territory that we rarely see a child portray, and her character still seems so raw and real. Importantly, too, protections seem to be in place to protect her from the true nature of the subject matter, so a lot of credit is due to de Araújo for protecting her young actress while still drawing out a revelatory performance.
The film also focuses on the ways that Josephine’s parents attempt to guide her through her trauma. While they are put in an impossible situation, the ways in which they fail her are very revealing. The first person in the film to ask her what she saw is a police officer, presumably days after the rape.
Damien has a particularly insufficient response to Josephine’s trauma that becomes clear as the film runs on, revealing a masculine attitude towards rape that masquerades as allyship but is really just posturing. His response to Josephine’s anger is entirely about making himself feel like a good parent while avoiding any actual tough conversations or remediations that could actually help her.
Damien’s solutions for Josephine are entirely about the physical struggle of rape—sending her to self-defense classes, and giving her assurances that it will never happen to her. By doing this, he entirely brushes over the psychological struggle she is going through, attempting to understand how a human could rape another human. She internalizes some of his attitudes, too, remarking that it happened because “the man was faster and stronger.” But carefully, the film shows that her real struggle is trying to understand how someone is capable of such evil.
And ultimately, who are we to say that Josephine needs to get over her trauma? What is the “appropriate” response to rape, after all? Should we let the evil in the world control our destinies and give up on life? Should we be joking at the department store mere hours after witnessing something truly evil? Is there a middle ground between despair and numbness that is acceptable, and acceptable to whom? To ourselves, to our loved ones, to the victims, to God? Josephine is thoughtful enough to ask all of these questions and know that there are no answers.
Yet, there is also bravery and good in the world. Despite acting out in many ways, towards the end of the film, Josephine does something truly good and is recognized for it. Despite her young age and her struggles to understand what she has seen, she has done her part to improve the world. Our crippling trauma doesn’t help anybody. Only our actions can.
