Luce (2019)

By all accounts, Luce is a major success story. After experiencing strife and war in his East African home, he was adopted by a white couple in America and is now enjoying his senior year as the pride of his school. But when he turns in a concerning essay, his teacher decides to search his locker, which somehow becomes the worst decision of her life.

I was wowed by this film. It was complex and forced me to shift allegiance several times, but without feeling as though I'd been fooled by red herrings. The more I found out about each person's perspective, the more I could empathize with that person's actions. Though there were definite sides to the story, right and wrong was subjective.

Kelvin Harrison Jr. really delivered here, somehow both sympathetic and terrifying . There are a couple of especially effective bits: 1) the juxtaposition between when he's practicing his speech and mourning his lost self, represented by his original name, and then delivering that speech to an audience and playing it for laughs and 2) the final scene where he seems to allow himself to temporarily discard his carefully controlled persona during a solo run.

A-