‘Nickel Boys’: pioneering a new visual style to work against the trappings of misery porn
Within the current framework of modern cinema, it feels truly rare to see something that you’ve never seen before. There are conglomerate-like studios that strip arthouse directors of their individuality and streaming services that lure audiences to the comfort of their homes and away from the cinema – there is no need to be challenged when you can rewatch The Princess Diaries for the 17th time from your bed.
Because of this, some projects slip through the net, with commercial blockbusters being prioritised and pushed onto our plates despite containing no substance that could warrant such an outpour of praise. But amongst all the glorified rubbish that has somehow crept its way into the awards circuit, there is one film that truly deserves such recognition, with a bold and uncompromising vision that gives me renewed hope for the future of cinema itself.
Nickel Boys is RaMell Ross’ directorial debut, a shocking fact given how assured and exact he is in his perspective. The film follows a bright young Black man called Elwood, who is wrongly sent to a reform school in Florida. During his time there, he forms a friendship with a student called Turner, searching for a way out as they try to survive the horrors of the harsh regime together.
Ross opens with snippets of some of the most delicate and considered imagery I have ever seen articulated on screen, with beautifully slow and patient shots that depict the haze of childhood – a knife scraping cake frosting on the edge of a plate, a leaf spinning through fingers, a dry-cleaned suit hanging in the car as sunlight dapples through the window. The gentleness of these images is undercut by the quiet threat of what is to come, with flashes of unsettling images such as a crocodile walking across the road and the wail of police sirens, foreshadowing the ending of adolescent bliss.
But what is most stark about the opening of Nickel Boys, is the fact that we have no idea what our hero looks like, with everything being shot from the first-person perspective. We have no idea how old he is during each memory that we see on screen, but we slowly learn that his age, identity or innocence doesn’t matter because as a young Black boy living in the south, many people don’t see him for who he truly is.
After being falsely convicted for the crime of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, Elwood is sent to a correctional facility in Florida, with the audience observing the horrors of his experiences entirely through his perspective, with the camera adapting his physiology as it shakes during an intake of breath and pans towards the floor as he avoids the gaze of other people, trying to stay away from anything that could cause more trouble. Combined with the immersive sound design, Ross creates an inescapable spectatorial experience that wraps us entirely in the injustice of Elwood’s life, leaving us empathetically and viscerally connected to the characters in a way that feels almost documentarian. We see life entirely through the eyes of the two main characters at the heart of the story, offering an entirely new perspective on a familiar story, shifting the focus away from watching these horrors unfold and instead experiencing them from a new angle.
There have been many films over the years that focus on racial discrimination and injustice. However, this has sometimes led to the commercialisation and exploitation of marginalised communities on screen, with traumatic experiences being used for entertainment without providing any nuance on the subject matter. Some filmmakers have inadvertently created misery porn in their attempt to draw attention to these experiences, with the characters experiencing a relentless onslaught of distressing incidents without any deeper commentary on why this is happening, with the director assuming that their pain is enough to infer meaning. Because of this, we’ve seen many Black characters on screen subjected to extreme violence and abuse, sparking many conversations about how the depiction of racism on screen can be counter-productive and oppressive, with these struggles sometimes being depicted in one-note and reductive narratives that do more harm than good.
However, in the case of Nickel Boys, the violence that the boys are subject to is largely abstracted and happens off-camera, with Ross never lingering on their suffering or pain. In an industry that has profited from the commercialisation of Black pain, Ross makes a poignant statement about how to show this violence respectfully and not as a spectacle, revising the language in movies that has been used to further subjugate Black characters by showing explicit portrayals of their abuse.
Through shooting the picture in the first-person perspective, Ross goes against the trappings of misery porn by showing the new ways in which this story can be told, with a transformative take on a long-lasting cinematic narrative that has historically been unkind to its subjects. Among the heated debates about the correct visual articulation of these stories, Ross proves how cathartic and revolutionary it is to reframe these experiences through a different lens. Through this technique, Elwood becomes detached and deeply connected to the audience, inviting us to see him as a real person and abstract figure representing something much bigger. He becomes a ghostly reflection of a story we know too well, with the disembodied nature of his character reflecting the many boys who were lost to the same tragedy and the invisible faces who have been erased through previous retellings of this story, as well as directly reconnecting viewers with the humanity of these boys and infusing much-needed care and compassion into a story that has so often been neglected.
