Girl

The feature-length writing and directorial debut of Adura Onashile, Girl follows Grace (Déborah Lukumuena), a single mother who lives alone with her daughter Ama (Le’Shantey Bonsu) in a small flat in Glasgow. The two love each other dearly, but Grace is fiercely protective of her daughter, forbidding her from leaving the house and restricting contact with the outside world as much as she can. However, as Ama starts learning more about the world around her (and her own rapidly changing body), the walls of their small flat start feeling more like a prison, and Grace’s efforts to protect her daughter threaten to tear the two apart.

“Claustrophobic” is the key word when it comes to Girl, with every aspect of its production creating and maintaining many different senses of intimacy, taking the idea of enclosed spaces and running with it in a variety of compelling directions.

The cinematography puts in a lot of work to paint these diverse shades of claustrophobia, making for a very impressive first showing of Onashile’s directing skills. The piece’s camera work makes the familiar domestic setting of urban Glasgow feel alien and unnerving, bringing out depth and character to the restrictive surroundings and making the environment as much of a central character as Ama and Grace while mirroring their inner turmoil. This is accentuated by excellent framing and colour work, which serve to expose the complex emotions at play in almost painful clarity while also ensuring the film is a visual treat throughout.

The sound design is also fantastic, elevating the various forms of closeness examined throughout the film with its heavy focus on choral music that communicates both delicate, tender moments and fraught, tense scenes, giving the film an aural diversity that matches the great visuals.

The cinematography and sound are bolstered further by incredibly strong performances, drawing powerful emotions from Girl’s deliberately understated script. Lukumuena is brilliant in the leading role, with a fantastic emotional range, and the chemistry she has with Bonsu is gripping throughout, with the leading ladies flawlessly facilitating the complex and constantly shifting character dynamics at the heart of the story.

Overall, Girl is a phenomenal debut for Onashile, a multifaceted and intelligent character study that is simultaneously harrowing and heartwarming. Its story covers a lot of complicated ideas and motifs but does so with deceptive simplicity and heaps of style and passion.

Umar Ali

Girl is released in select cinemas on 24^th November 2023.

Watch the trailer for Girl here: