Guardian writers pick their favourite hidden gems from the year including a jumpy supernatural thriller and a tender queer romance
Makwa (Phoenix Wilson) may smoke cigarettes and wear a tough-guy leather jacket, but his face betrays the soft, doughy features of a pre-teen boy. Alternately neglected and beaten by his father, he’s an emotionally inarticulate knot of coiled rage. Cruelty is learned behaviour. The idea, that those who experience trauma are destined to repeat the cycle, is at the centre of the sinewy debut feature from Indigenous
American writer-director Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr. In the film, Makwa, a young Ojibwe boy living on a reservation in Wisconsin, commits a violent crime and escapes the consequences. When we revisit him as an adult, this time portrayed with icy detachment by a transfixing Michael Greyeyes, he’s reinvented himself. Living in
Los Angeles, with an office
Job and a blond wife, he’s attempted to scrub himself of the culture he grew up around. But generational trauma leaves a stain. Simran Hans