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Meant to see this in theaters but missed that 2-week window.
This was a pretty great psychological thriller and, although its serious film festival aura exempted it from such company, better in many of the same ways than Ma which also came out this year and featured a rocking performance by Octavia Spencer. Typically based on a theater play and probably expanded to feature a more cinematic approach, Luce tells the story of a black kid from war-torn Africa adopted by a couple of progressive snobs (played with relish by Naomi Watts and Tim Roth who must have got along well in Funny Games) who gets on the wrong side of Spencer's aggressively police-like teacher. As is usually the case with good drama, every character is both right and wrong and there's plenty of layered, adult conflict as to their motivations and desires.
The story isn't quite full-fleshed enough to give all the many, many sociopolitical issues here the necessary developing runtime, so that more than a few scenes come off like thematic pointers rather than full narrative drama. But I appreciate how thorny and ambiguous most of them are engaged with; the sturdy filmmaking (more cinematic than most filmed plays) and performances also keep the screenplay life-sized, especially Spencer's severity and Harrison's astonishingly layered slipperiness. 7/10
Certainly starts off with the potential of being one of those excellent theater pieces that transitions to film well, but there's not enough in the script to get there. The acting and Julius Onah's direction certainly do their best.... But it ends up being pretty forgettable to me.