There might not be anything else like RaMell Ross’ Nickel Boys. Adapting the 2019 novel by Colson Whitehead, Ross finds an unorthodox approach here: extrapolating the book’s third-person narrative into a first-person point-of-view, the camera almost entirely presenting the action as through the eyes of its protagonists. Think Peep Show, but as a serious and urgent drama.

It follows Elwood (Ethan Herisse), a young idealist living in Jim Crow-era Florida. Under false accusations, he’s sent to the Nickel Academy for Boys, a “correction school” — in reality a prison by any other name, complete with the exploitation of its inmates as free labour. While there, Elwood befriends another young man named Turner (Brandon Wilson), who has a much more cynical outlook on freedom for African-Americans or any potential of escaping the school itself.

The camerawork becomes a way of illustrating a character’s thoughts without narration, and with an immediacy that feels unprecedented.