Writer and Director: Beth de Araújo
In his latest foray into the world of serious film, Magic Mike star Channing Tatum doesn’t veer too far from his image of the perfect, wholesome American male. Here, in Beth de Araújo’s film, he plays the father of 8-year-old Josephine. Every Sunday morning, they awake early to watch Liverpool play football on the TV, before running to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco at the crack of dawn, where he teaches her soccer skills. Tatum is fine in his role, but his character could do with some more layers early on in the film.
Josephine starts on one of these Sundays. Father and daughter are leaving home for the park. They exit through the garage, and Damien is encouraging his daughter to press the button to close the garage door from inside and run outside before the door closes completely. We see the scene from Josephine’s point of view, her hand hesitating on the switch, her breath laboured with excitement. She fails her first effort and is rooted to the spot as she watches the door descend quicker than she anticipated. Damien is patient. All she needs is a little courage, which becomes the theme of the rest of the film.
At the park, Josephine runs off ahead of her dad and for a short time loses him amid the trees and the bushes. As she waits for him to catch up, she witnesses the violent rape of an early morning jogger outside the isolated public toilets. Frozen, yet curious, she watches every brutal detail, not fully understanding what she sees. The camera shots switch between Josephine’s uncomprehending face and the rape itself, fully revealing the horrors of the latter to the audience. When the rapist spies the young girl observing, he approaches. Fortunately, Damien appears. He calls the police, and then chases the attacker through the park. It’s through his actions that the rapist is so speedily captured.
All this happens in the film’s opening 10 minutes. The remainder of the film centres on Josephine’s double loss of innocence; she now knows what sex is and also that there are violent men in the world who will force women into having it. Damien and his wife Claire argue about what they should do. The little-too-perfect Claire wants to go down the route of child therapy while Damien believes they should deal with it themselves. Josephine is one step ahead though, searching for the definition of rape on Google and explaining it to her friends at school.
Of course, she doesn’t grasp the gravity of such a crime, and it doesn’t help that her parents talk in generalisations that only confuse her further. A couple of altercations at school and further police proceedings mean that Claire and Damien have to face the matter head-on.
The parents’ conflicting opinions on how to tackle such thorny issues are drama enough, and Tatum, Gemma Chan as Claire and the extraordinary Mason Reeves as Josephine could ably carry these tensions to the end of the film. But writer/director de Araújo adds a thriller veneer to the unfolding events, not least the ghostly appearance of the rapist (Philip Ettinger in an unenviable role) in Josephine’s bedroom. Later, there are intruder alarms going off in the middle of the night, some ominous close-ups of a pair of scissors and the beeping of a metal detector at the entrance to a courtroom, all suggesting that there will be some kind of bloody showdown. These elements certainly keep the film taut, but simultaneously cheapen the subject matter. Miles Ross’s moody music also hints that there will be more disaster to come.
Tatum’s best scenes arrive at the film’s end when his character realises that he’s ageing, and he can no longer keep pace with Josephine on their Sunday morning runs. Damien looks old; he’s balding, and there are bags under his eyes. His masculinity has been compromised by the ravages of time, and by the fact that he can’t guarantee that his daughter will be safe from harm in the future. Eventually he must let Josephine, who is now older than her years, go out alone. This examination of fatherhood should be at the film’s heart rather than at its end. The reliance on suspense tropes does Josephine no favours.
Josephine is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2026 from 7-18 October.
