Nickel Boys: The blistering drama showing the US's racist past from a new, first-person perspective

 

There's no film this year, perhaps no film this decade, that looks and feels like Nickel Boys. The innovative new film from director RaMell Ross is based on the Pulitzer prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead about an abusive "reform" school for boys, and provides a revolutionary perspective on the US's racist past (and how it always informs the present), during the era of Jim Crow. This is in part because it focuses on the human experience rather than oppressive systems and punishment, above all through its use of a first-person viewpoint. Ross drops us behind the eyes of Elwood (Ethan Herisse), an idealistic young man living in Florida in the 1960s, a bright future ahead of him. That's cut short when he's wrongfully convicted of car theft and sent to Nickel Academy. The school is functionally a jail, based on a real institution in Florida known for the discovery of dozens of unmarked graves on its property.

At Nickel, Elwood meets another young man named Turner (Brandon Wilson), who has a more cynical outlook on the civil rights movement that is unfolding at the time of their imprisonment. Ross frequently switches perspectives, not just between first-person and third-person framing (where the camera is locked to behind the character's head) but also between the viewpoints of Elwood and Turner, letting us see each character how their friend sees them and transforming our view of each in the process. Like the book, it also periodically checks in with an adult Elwood (Daveed Diggs) reckoning with what happened.

Ross says that the camerawork in Nickel Boys is designed to reflect how every human being is the centre of their own world, but also how they experience the world in a way that they haven't yet processed. "It's about giving the person – about giving Elwood – not the hindsight of ourselves, which is to look at things as if they're meaningful, but just to look at things that will become meaningful," he tells the BBC. "So the narrative will always be secondary to the experience of looking."

Awards Watch

Nickel Boys earned a Golden Globe Award nomination for Best Motion Picture - Drama. Click here for more on the films getting awards buzz.

The way in which Elwood and Turner's individual experiences are presented through the cameras – which were operated by Ross himself as well as cinematographer Jomo Fray and another cameraman, Sam Ellison, so they could each take breaks – includes movement mimicking that of a person's eyes; the characters voices' come from off screen, and you see their hands and feet, and sometimes their faces if they look at a reflective surface. Sometimes you really feel the restriction of their point of view, such as when they are getting chased and can't tell how far someone is behind them, or hear menacing noises around the corner in their racially segregated hometown.

Amazon MGM Studios

The first-person view means that you often see only the characters' hands and feet, or their faces in reflective surfaces (Credit: Amazon MGM Studios)

The filming challenges 

In order to create that point of view, the practical requirements of shooting in first person were demanding, but also allowed for spontaneity. Ross and Fray did away with a lot of the traditional structuring and planning of shots, and things were adjusted depending on the scene.

Ross says that "the blocking became more gestural" – more about considering what the character would be looking at, and how to make it so that body parts showed up in frame correctly, than it was about about traditional orchestration of how and where actors moved. For the filming of some of these point-of-view shots, the actor for the character whose eyes we are looking through wasn't even on set.

Nickel Boys isn't the first film to use first-person cinematography, but it's certainly the first mainstream film release to use it in such a profound way. In the past, it's a technique which has mostly been reserved for gimmicky horrors or action films that are often emulating first-person shooter video games – take for example 2017 Korean film The Villainess, or the (awful) 2015 sci-fi thriller Hardcore Henry.

Why can't we get closer to our sensibility and subjectivity on screen? – RaMell Ross

Nickel Boys goes in the opposite direction to these types of films – instead of using the first-person point of view in service of pumped-up sensationalism, Ross is looking to throw out traditional narrative form and create something much more impressionistic. It's a striking choice, in particular, for a film based on a novel, when so often such adaptations rely on chunks of diaristic voiceover and rigid structure. Nickel Boys shows how offering a visual window into the things that a character pays attention to is as good as internal monologue in helping the audience to understand them.

To Ross, the choice to shoot a lot of the film from the first-person viewpoint seemed obvious. "Why can't we get closer to our sensibility and subjectivity on screen," he asks. In particular, he says, adopting the first person POV "seemed to me just to be an act that would be refreshing for black folks, to look up on the screen and see their hands are doing something in the world. For many years I've been like, 'Why has no one ever made [a film like] this?'"

Ross acknowledges that he is hardly the first filmmaker