Film review: Harrowing scenes in Origin and a compelling performance by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor stars as author Isabel Wilkerson in Origin

★★★★☆

Commissioned to write a feature on the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Isabel Wilkerson (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), baulks at the idea that this latest shooting of a young black man should be labelled as straightforwardly racist.

Instead, she argues, Trayvon’s death is a more complicated affair, the consequence of a caste system to be found in modern America, Nazi Germany and in India since time immemorial.

Writer-director Ava DuVernay doesn’t simply adapt Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents; instead, Origin (12A) is the story of Wilkerson’s process of writing that book as she pulls together a number of historical threads from around the globe, all the while mourning the death of her beloved mother, Ruby (Emily Yancy), and her husband, Brett (Jon Bernthal).

It is inevitable, perhaps, given that its source is a non-fiction title, that the film occasionally lapses into exposition as Isabel teases out her theories, but the story really comes alive when DuVernay illustrates her thesis.

The scenes in which sociologists Allison (Isha Blaaker) and Elizabeth Davis (Jasmine Cephas Jones) witness a Nazi book-burning ceremony, for example, are truly harrowing, as are the grotesque indignities experienced by India’s modern Dalits, who occupy the lowest rung in the caste system and were previously known as the ‘untouchables’.

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor is utterly compelling in her multi-faceted role of an intellectual giant who takes on the burden of excavating the hidden pillars of the modern world, this despite being emotionally hollowed out as she grieves her irreplaceable loss.

(cinema release)