When a police investigator asks eight-year-old Josephine (newcomer Mason Reeves), the title character in Beth de Araújo’s (Soft & Quiet) devastating crime drama/character study, if she’s seen the perpetrator of a violent crime in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park before, Josephine’s response -- “I see him every day; I see him all the time” -- gives both the characters onscreen and the audience on the opposite side of the screen an encapsulation of Josephine’s unresolved, ongoing trauma.
Emphasizing that witnesses can be victims too (as can their immediate families), de Araújo centers Josephine from the film’s first moments, mixing first- and third-person points of view, as Josephine’s inadvertent separation from her father, Damien (Channing Tatum), during an early Sunday jog, through the incident, a sexual assault on a woman captured with unsparing detail, through the profound, life-altering impact that ripples through Josephine, Damien, and Josephine’s mother, Claire (Gemma Chan), over the course of days, weeks, and ultimately months through a criminal trial where Josephine will be a key witness in the prosecution's case.
As adults around her grapple with how much, if anything, to share with Josephine about the violent attack and its aftermath, she takes a natural interest in the scraps of information she acquires about the incident, often misunderstanding or only partially understanding weighty issues (sex, rape, consent), applying what she learns or think she's learned to interacting with the world outside her window. It remains, however, nothing an eight-year-old should explore on her own or even with the halting, sometimes contradictory help from her parents, each of whom approaches Josephine’s mental, emotional, and physical health differently.
Where Damien gravitates towards protecting Josephine, keeping her busy through sports and, later, self-defense classes, Claire recognizes that only a therapist can help Josephine navigate the conflicting, unresolved feelings and thoughts connected to the violent incident she witnessed in the park. Initially, Damien's approach wins out, mostly because it’s the path of least resistance, and Josephine’s desperately desires to return to her normal routine (school, sports, family time). But like any trauma that lingers unacknowledged or unresolved, Josephine’s unspoken desire for a return to normality proves illusory, even destructive, as that trauma repeatedly resurfaces, leading to outbursts of anger, confusion, and physicality bordering on violence.
Exploring contemporary San Francisco almost exclusively through Josephine's eyes and ears, de Araújo keeps the camera literally at Josephine’s eye level, looking up and into a world of giants. Periodic subjective point-of-view shots also keep us tethered to Josephine and how she experiences the world. A touch of the surreal or the hallucinatory enters the frame when a silent, spectral version of the green shirt-clad attacker quietly enters Josephine’s bedroom or makes himself visible when Josephine feels the most vulnerable or unsafe. He's both a figurative ghost and a living memory for Josephine.
Sensitively attuned to how Josephine views and interacts with the world, de Araújo often shoots Josephine in tight, almost claustrophobic close-ups, a choice that deliberately leaves the audience at the tides and turns of Josephine’s roiling state of mind. When Josephine, incapable of giving voice to her emotional pain and frustrated at her mother's intransigence, runs away at a stoplight, leaving Claire behind, it sets off a desperate chase to find Josephine before she harms herself or, in turn, becomes another victim in an adult world.
Directed with an assurance that only comes from a clear authorial vision, de Araújo coaxes a nuanced, layered performance from eight-year-old Reeves. Never once does Reeves deliver a false or errant note across Josephine's running time, making the final result a deeply moving, heartrending exploration of the loss of innocence and the unintended consequences thereof.
Josephine premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.