Origin 

Written and directed by Ava DuVernay

Review by Maame Blue

A Black woman thinks and a story unfolds.

It is rare to see such a thing on film; a Black woman writer being allowed to take her time to ponder an idea over conversations she’s having and devastating news she has heard. And then, to see her writing down those thoughts and threading together a story that matters. It is rare. In Origin, written and directed by Ava DuVernay, that is the thing presented to us on screen. 

This is the story of a Black woman, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson (played to perfection by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), ruminating over an idea that is sparked when she listens to the police tapes from the Trayvon Martin trial. Wilkerson’s bestselling book Caste: The Origins of our Discontents, a nonfiction book published in 2020 that has been heralded as essential to the American literary canon, serves as the weighty source material for the film.

DuVernay spent two years interviewing the real Isabel Wilkerson, learning about her story and the threads that eventually came together for her book to arrive in the world. And this is where the film spreads its wings; it pulls the viewer in with a human story that is specific yet somehow entirely familiar. Much of this is due to the electric chemistry on screen between Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor and Jon Bernthal as Isabel’s husband Brett – a role that Bernthal lobbied for passionately. But there are also star turns from Niecy Nash-Betts, Blair Underwood and Audra McDonald that add depth and warmth to Isabel’s life on screen; inviting the audience to witness the reality of what it is to write the big things when your own life is falling apart.

Not unlike its nonfiction counterpart, Origin is expansive, exploring the notion of caste and how it connects the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the Jewish Holocaust and the Dalits (previously known as ‘Untouchables’) in India. The film changes location with short connecting scenes; moments of Isabel leaving and arriving at various airports, making visits to museums, and having conversations with scholars in India and Germany as she pieces together the core of her thesis: ‘Caste is everywhere, yet invisible. No one avoids exposure to its message. And the message is simple: one kind of person is more deserving of freedom than another kind.’

A film such as this, dealing with topics of mass genocide, police brutality and the enslavement and degradation of generations of people, requires moments of levity for the audience to breathe. DuVernay provides that by pulling at another thread from the book; the need for human connection and understanding, beyond anything else. On screen, this transports us to various stories of love and humanity across time, spanning centuries and returning to the present day. And the visual style and lighting of each scene – whether in 1930s Berlin or the 1800s in the deep south of America – remains the same, so that time feels continuous and the common themes of the film persist. In this way, DuVernay brings the audience along for the ride, always following that original train of thought.

There is no absolution or relief to be found in the atrocities that have already been committed in the name of caste, but in Origin we are left wondering about the significance of a Black woman thinking, and marvelling at the story that has unfolded.