Nickel Boys Review: An Immersive Visual Experience

Nickel Boys Is an Immersive Visual Experience Unlike Any Other

Nickel Boys was one of the highest-profile of potentially mainstream movies to screen at this year’s New York Film Festival, with an awards-friendly release already planned later this year from Amazon/MGM Studios. Yet the movie’s experimental style recalls the more adventurous side of NYFF, where international directors will often bring formally rigorous, ambitious, or challenging films to an appreciative audience: For the most part, director and cowriter RaMell Ross constructs his film version of Colson Whitehead’s acclaimed novel entirely in point-of-view shots.

First, we’re only privy to the first-person experiences of Elwood (Ethan Cole Sharp, then Ethan Herisse), a Black high school student in the Jim Crow-era Florida of the early ’60s. We see what Elwood sees, which means not much of his actual face or body, catching a glimpse of him as a faded image in a store window, where he gazes at a row of television sets – or, in one beautiful shot, his reflection in the metallic trim of an iron held by his grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor). Early in the film, Elwood, a strong student who qualifies to take classes at a local college, is wrongly accused of helping to steal a car. (He’s only just accepted a ride from a stranger.) The police send him to Nickel Academy, a reform school that Whitehead based on a real institution, trafficking in segregation and cruelty. Once there, Elwood, who earnestly believes he can work his way out of the system, befriends the more cynical Turner (Brandon Wilson), opening up a second avenue for POV shots. From there, the movie alternates between the two of them. Though they grow close, the two boys rarely get to share the frame – which makes one wonderful overhead-mirror shot, reproduced on the film’s poster, even more memorable.

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Shot after shot, in fact, sticks in the mind; even when the movie technically breaks from the point-of-view approach, the effect still lingers. The occasional archival footage, by its nature and through the movie’s context, starts to feel like a POV shot, as if we’re sitting alongside whoever is watching or reading the material in question. Another seeming departure, where a fixed point of view continually shows an adult version of one character from just behind him, affixed to his body but outside of it, distinguishes those flash-forward scenes. Later, it’s revealed to make even more thematic sense than it originally seems.

This might all sound very technical, and to some extent it is. But the discipline with which Ross adheres to his own rules belies what an intuitive, unrestrictive film he’s able to craft within and because of those constrictions. There are moments that audiences might resist some of the conceit, especially when the visuals seem to insist on a much narrower, closer-up field of vision than the average person actually experiences. (Some of the POV shots have such shallow focus that they would, in real life, imply that the boys are looking at their subjects from inches away.) But these obstacles fall away as it becomes clear how Ross wishes to direct our attention, especially regarding what’s kept offscreen – namely, the horrific abuse that these and other boys suffer at the hands of their instructors, most visibly Spencer (Hamish Linklater). Though Nickel Boys is at least in part about Black oppression and the suffering that comes along with it, Ross uses the movie’s point of view to avoid making a movie that turns that suffering into a marquee attraction or an endurance test. He sometimes asks a lot of his audience, but in a different direction: One where every major event of these boys’ lives isn’t immediately spelled out, or happening in their field of vision. In the process, Ross creates a cinematic experience that’s startling close to the simultaneous subjectivity and identification of prose, where no action is literally “seen” but a point of view is nonetheless intimately communicated.

Of course, there are images in Nickel Boys – some of the most indelible of the year. This is not simply a book transposed onto a screen. What we see is so visually immersive that it can be difficult to read the beautifully unaffected performances of Wilson and Herisse, especially at first. (The transition from Sharp to Herisse, the two actors who share the role of Elwood, feels both more gradual and more jarring, because Sharp in particular has little traditional screen time.) But they see each other, and then so do we. As much as the movie seems to be requiring closer attention, it really is that simple.

Director: RaMell Ross
Writers: RaMell Ross and Joslyn Barnes
Starring: Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Ethan Cole Sharp, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Hamish Linklater, Daveed Diggs
Release Date: Sept. 27, 2024 (New York Film Festival); December 13, 2024 (in theaters)

Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where offerings include an informal podcast. He also co-hosts the New Flesh, a podcast about horror movies, and wastes time on Twitter under the handle @rockmarooned.

Nickel Boys Is an Immersive Visual Experience Unlike Any Other