ORIGIN 🤩

Towards the beginning of the genre-defying ORIGIN, Isabel Wilkerson (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) states, “I wanna be inside the story, really inside.” As the movie continued, I realized that it was the director, Ava DuVernay’s voice. Since she burst onto the scene with SELMA, Duvernay has been a uniquely gifted storyteller who knows how to be inside the story by using cinema as the “empathy machine.” With ORIGIN, she removes all “containers” of what a film is supposed to be by ignoring the studio system and traditional narrative to create an experience that’s hard to put into words. But my most straightforward pitch is that it’s a hybrid between a docu-drama and Terrence Malick’s poetic films. 

At the surface level, it’s about the caste system and one woman’s journey to connect the world’s problems to it. Yet, underneath Wilkerson’s quest, the story is about love, grief, and connectivity. And DuVernay is a genius when it comes to capturing those elements. ORIGIN is relentless in making the audience sob throughout. At a certain point in the film, I realized I kept crying throughout the story, and by the end, it was one big emotional sob. 

Despite being one of the most emotionally and differently told stories this year, my only nit is that ORIGIN sometimes felt like a TED TALK. This is pretty heady material about making the caste system relatable to all. That history lessons are dense and, at times, felt bloated.

After reviewing SOCIETY OF THE SNOW, I said it was the film J.A. Bayona was born to make. The same should be stated about DuVernay and ORIGIN. This is her movie. It reminds us of what it feels like to be connected to others while teaching us. If that’s not movie magic, I don’t know what is.

It will be released this January in theaters.