The ghost of a possessed girl, trapped for centuries within a stone, encounters the director’s 102-year-old grandmother. What begins as a haunting becomes a tender dialogue, as archival, staged and documentary footage blur.
A refreshing twist is that all the kids’ powers are…kind of useless. There’s a kid who can only move in slow motion, a kid who has every power in the world but can only use them randomly, and our main character Missy who has no powers at all. The thesis of the film seems to be that it doesn’t matter what kind of powers you have, its the way you use them, which is good for the warm and fuzzies.
Netflix’s Shadow and Bone has a complicated relationship with race. It has a diverse cast, but not without its problems. Based on Leigh Bardugo’s two book series, the show features characters from the Shadow and Bone trilogy, which is very straight and white, and the Six of Crows duology, which is much more diverse. When bringing together a cast and writing about these characters, the team behind the show expanded upon some of the representation missing from the first trilogy, then seemed to take away representation from the duology. Shadow and Bone seems to play a bit of a push and pull game when it comes to portraying diversity onscreen.
True crime media is notoriously obsessed with the “missing white woman” trope, and yet the vast majority of American murder victims are male, and well over half are people of color.
As a frequent “the book was better” extoller, this movie was well worth the watch.
This action thriller is made with the hope that the black youth of America will feel empowered, and realize the significance of their heritage.
A trouble-making teenager spends the summer working at a Southern California beach learning about responsibility.
