By Jason Osiason

Beth de Araújo’s Josephine is the first truly great film I have seen at Sundance 2026 and the kind of movie that immediately changes the emotional temperature of a festival.

The film follows a young girl named Josephine who accidentally witnesses a brutal rape in a park. The moment shatters something fundamental inside her. She is too young to fully understand what she saw, but old enough to know that something terrible happened. From there the film becomes a quiet, devastating portrait of how that single moment fractures her childhood and destabilizes her entire family. Josephine begins acting out, struggling to process what she witnessed while the adults around her scramble to make sense of the damage. Eventually the legal system enters the picture and the family is forced to confront the trauma in a courtroom, where Josephine’s memory of the event becomes the center of a painful and invasive process.

The film is unbearably tense and genuinely shattering. What de Araújo does so well is resist sensationalizing the violence. The story instead focuses on the emotional fallout. The slow breaking of childhood innocence. The way trauma ripples outward and quietly rearranges the lives of everyone in its path.

I kept thinking about In the Bedroom while watching it. There is that same suffocating quiet tension and refusal to manipulate the audience. The film trusts stillness. It trusts silence. And it trusts the audience to sit inside the discomfort.

Channing Tatum is fantastic here. It is easily some of the most vulnerable and precise work I have seen from him. He plays a father trying to hold together a family that is already splintering beneath him, and he does it with a restraint that feels painfully real.

But the real revelation is Mason Gooding. What he does in this film is remarkable. Child performances this raw and emotionally present are incredibly rare. The entire film rests on his shoulders and he carries it with a kind of natural honesty that never once feels like acting.

What stunned me most though was the cinematography. The film is shot largely from Josephine’s physical and emotional perspective. The camera stays low, intimate, almost at a child’s eye level, and it completely alters how you experience the story. Adults often appear fragmented or distant while Josephine’s emotional world dominates the frame. It is such a simple concept but executed with incredible care, complexity, and grace.

And then there is the courtroom sequence. The cross examination scene is absolutely one for the ages. It is brutal, tense, and almost impossible to watch without feeling your chest tighten. It is the moment where everything the film has been building finally collides.

I adored this film. It is painful, difficult, and deeply humane filmmaking. The kind that leaves you shaken long after the lights come up.

For me it is easily the first great film of Sundance 2026. [B+]