Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan Face a Park Assault in 'Josephine'

By Daniel Okafor

'Josephine' opens in US theaters on Friday, November 20. The film stars Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan as parents whose daughter witnesses an assault in a San Francisco park on an ordinary Saturday morning.

Writer-director Beth de Araújo based the incident loosely on something that happened to her as a child. The fallout is her own construction. Mason Reeves, a newcomer from the same part of San Francisco where Araújo grew up, plays the title role. She was cast only six weeks before shooting began.

What did critics say at Sundance and TIFF?

The film premiered at Sundance and has toured the fall festival circuit to, per the source, great acclaim. IndieWire's Kate Erbland reviewed it with a verdict that doubles as a warning label.

"Araújo remains undefeated when it comes to making stunning films that I will both heartily recommend and never, ever watch again," Erbland wrote. "The word that comes to mind when watching a Araújo feature is heartsick."

Er bland noted a formal shift from Araújo's debut, the 2022-circuit title 'Soft & Quiet,' which was designed to look like a single real-time take. The new film, she wrote, works through "the steady accumulation of dread." That's one critic's way of saying the second one tightens the screws rather than dropping them at once.

How long did the film take to reach the screen?

Araújo described a slow, stop-start process to IndieWire at TIFF. The timeline:

• First draft written in 2014
• Major revision in 2018 as part of that year's Sundance Labs (the institute's script-development program)
• Casting of Reeves six weeks before the shoot

The long gap between draft and set suggests a filmmaker who waited for the right actors. The material, presumably, doesn't forgive approximations.

Araújo also addressed the responsibility of making the film around a young lead. "I think everyone felt a real responsibility to make sure Mason had a good experience," she told IndieWire. "And I think that bonded us all as cast and crew. It's like, there's something more innocent than us here."

The film's framing is blunt: the distance between the world parents want to build for children and the world that actually exists. In 'Josephine,' that distance gets measured in a single morning.

Whether a theatrical audience shows up for a dread-accumulator with a child witness at its center is the open question. The November 20 release will answer it.