Origin – Film Review
by Brian Merriman

Director: Ava DuVernay
Writers: Ava DuVernay, Isabel Wilkerson
Stars: Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Jon Bernthal, Niecy Nash, Emily Yancy, Audra McDonald,
Based on the best-selling book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson,
Duration: 141 minutes

You know from the moment the film opens that something is about to happen. There is no sinister music, opaque onlooker or sudden noises. There is just a young man buying a can of pop and some ‘Skittles’ and laughing with his friend on the phone, but you know. The tension rises when he puts up the hood on his hoodie…doom is inevitable. It heightens when we realise he is walking home at night in a ‘white neighbourhood’. Why? Because he is a young Black man in the USA.

The use of the 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin (nicely played by Myles Frost) as a backdrop, triggers in all of us what we know, we know and what we are about to experience and understand. It is more, much more.

The personal drama is centred around a series of sudden loss in the life of writer Wilkerson, in a fine, strong and dignified performance by Aunjanue Eiilis-Taylor. Loss can sometimes enable us to recall what we have been taught, witnessed and experienced. It can also create the void where the work that needs to be done, fills the empty space that the missing loved ones leave behind.

In getting back on her feet, Wilkerson reconsiders an offer to examine the causes that led to young Martin’s murder, that go way beyond racism. She asks, why do some people go out and target certain people who they fear or perceive as a danger and are convinced that their loss would not be missed? It is a layered and complex examination expertly and dramatically handled on screen.

‘Origin’ uses an innovative cinematic structure to convey an exploration of the academic theory, set out in a best-selling book, to the screen. It is not a documentary per se. There are actors, beautifully sketched characters, real and created, and there is history, contemporary and older. It is set out like an exploration of a topic for a dissertation, but as Marion (a grounded performance by Niecy Nash) says throughout… ‘keep it simple, say it so we will understand it’. And ‘Origin’ does exactly that.

Cinema is often an important leader in our own response to current events. ‘Origin’s’ exploration of inequality and racism as a construction from history is wonderfully and plausibly set out. It is a gripping story of deceit and gullibility.

We see how all the tricks of extreme politics are being poorly cloaked again today, to persuade some people that they are ‘superior’ to others and that minorities are denying them the full entitlements of their natural superiority.

The first tactic deployed by extremes to control, is dehumanisation, like we see today of democratic politicians. Elon Musk recently told us our elected leaders “hate us”. He is not original in this tactic and the bringing to life of moments in history throughout the film, is not only persuasive but inspiring.  From slavery, to the Holocaust, to segregation, to enforced labour, impoverishment and miscegenation – all are just part of a returning circle of dishonesty to discredit and control.

The graphic illustration of what David Norris reminded us of in his final address to Seanad Eireann of “man’s inhumanity to man” is stark and real. The slave ships, the book burning, the lesser-known use of their study by the Nazis, as to how the US enslaved Black people, long after slavery ended, and the ongoing horror of the caste system, all are the oxygen needed for hatred to take hold. It is shocking.

The scenes of the tasks left to the “Untouchables” (the Dalits) the “lowest caste” in India, leave you unable to breathe. The democratic world has rightly ostracised apartheid regimes in the past, yet India sits at the most powerful tables. The treatment of 200 million Dalit people is horrible to watch and unbearably powerful in its on-screen truth. There are no words that could justify the ongoing marginalisation of so many people in their own country and the silence of democrats to their suffering.

The story of a Youngstown Ohio, little leaguer’ Al Bright in 1951, walks with you as you leave the cinema. The contrast in the behaviour of the adults towards the child is hopeful and the regret of inaction remains decades later with survivors.

If you want to really understand how extremes work in this election year, allow this film’s careful and systematic setting out of the construction of difference to enlighten you. Writers Wilkinson and DuVernay have done their homework, drawing on history, and other researchers (well played by a large supporting cast) in shining a new light on forgotten or dismissed academic work. It is a calm, logical, well-researched, revealing and dramatic film. It adds so much more important information to what we know we know.

‘Origin’ not only shows us how the opening sequence could happen, but how such attitudes are deliberate and disseminated to replace equality with oppression and enslavement and how it is being repeated today.

In this year of global and national elections, the people once again get the privileged power to decide on the next stage of our democracy, by their vote. There is nothing more powerful than an informed vote. Education is power. You will be educated and empowered by this riveting on-screen treatment of ‘what we know’ but too often, decline to recall correctly.