Josephine: a harrowing child’s eye view of the injustice faced by sexual assault survivors
Beth de Araújo’s film about an eight-year-old girl who witnesses a horrific crime is clearly about a loss of innocence but also skilfully shows how that loss can shatter a family.
Reviewed from the 2026 Berlin International Film Festival
“You can still get hurt, even with a seatbelt,” a gruff cop tells Josephine (Mason Reeves) as she waits in the back of a police car. The 8-year-old has just witnessed a violent sexual assault in her local park, where she had been running with her father Damien (Channing Tatum). Josephine sits in numb confusion, still struggling to understand what she has seen. Amidst the fog, the cop’s throwaway comment lingers, heralding the overturning of Josephine’s entire worldview. Sometimes men attack women. Sometimes parents – and seatbelts – can’t keep you safe.
In Josephine, filmmaker Beth de Araújo delivers both a powerful coming of age parable and a tense legal procedural, at the core of which lies a furious indictment of the difficulties faced by survivors of sexual assault trying to secure justice. This latter element is so effective, partly because it sneaks into the film stealthily, filtered through the title character’s gradually evolving child’s eye perspective.
Despite presenting the world from Josephine’s point of view, there is never any ambiguity to what has transpired. The rape, which occurs within the first 15 minutes, is shot graphically in unflinching early morning light. In a clearing a few feet away from where Josephine is standing (exactly how many feet will become a key contested point later), Josephine watches mute and still as jogger Sandra (Syra McCarthy) is attacked by Greg (Philip Ettinger). Damien’s arrival sends the rapist running, the police are called and Greg is immediately apprehended. But despite the apparently cut-and-dry circumstances, it soon becomes clear that this arrest is not the end of this ordeal. When Greg pleads not guilty, and the traumatised Sandra leaves the state, Josephine becomes the prosecution’s key witness, opening up a debate between father Damien and mother Claire (Gemma Chan) over whether to allow their child to testify.
The decision is made harder by the slow reveal of the extent of Josephine’s trauma, and her parents’ inability to agree on what to do next. At first, Damien acts like nothing has happened, even taking Josephine straight from that police car to football practice as planned. But, of course, something has happened, and when Josephine begins to behave violently, it’s clear something has to be done. Claire tries to take her daughter to a psychiatrist, against the wishes of Damien who, reluctant to admit his daughter is a victim, thinks self-defence classes are the answer. As these interventions fail, Josephine’s trauma morphs and deepens, carrying with it her parents’ desperate hope to return to their family’s past sense of innocence and security.
De Araújo’s previous feature was the resourceful psychological horror Soft & Quiet (2022), and as Josephine progresses, a similar underplayed terror begins to bubble through the cracks of this otherwise realist drama. Greg starts to appear as a kind of hellish imaginary friend, first as a creeping presence in Josephine’s peripheral vision, then later becoming a fixture in her day-to-day life, sitting in the corner of Josephine’s bedroom, or joining the family at their dinner table.
Only Josephine can see Greg, and the matter-of-fact way she accepts this intruder’s presence only makes him more chilling; “I see him everywhere,” she tells state prosecutor (Michael Angelo Covino), with calm pragmatism. While Josephine’s escalating behaviour – the secret hoarding of scissors, an ever alert sense of threat – seems abrupt to her parents, the viewer shares her visions of Greg, and therefore better understands her mounting, quietly-held fear (credit has to be given here too to Greta Zozula’s inventive cinematography, which places us powerfully inside Josephine’s confused subjectivity). These elements of domestic horror offer an effective visualisation of the corrosive effect of Josephine’s unaddressed trauma and also contributes to an escalating dread when we sense that the child’s passive affect is about to break into something more sinister. Even contextualised as they are, as the desperate actions of a traumatised child, Josephine’s brief explosions of violent behaviour land with genuine shock.
Josephine is clearly a film about loss of innocence, but its cleverness lies in how it demonstrates that this loss cuts in multiple directions. A child’s sense of safety has been shattered, but so has her parents. Sandra’s faith in the legal system’s promise of justice and protection also lies in tatters. Ultimately Josephine is a smart, observant film about the illusions we carry in order to survive – and how perhaps, on the other side of trauma, we might reach a new understanding of the world we live in.