95 min | R | November 18, 2022 | A24
A young gay Black man with nowhere left to go enlists in the Marine Corps. Boot camp promises to make him into someone his mother might finally love. The uniform does not change who you are. It just gives other men a reason to break you.
Ellis French is homeless, rejected by his mother, and out of options. He joins the Marines because the Corps will take him when nothing else will. The film follows him through a boot camp that demands conformity from a man whose existence the institution treats as a problem to be solved. Elegance Bratton draws on his own life to ask what a person will endure to belong to something. The real subject is not war. It is the price of acceptance from people who will never fully grant it.
Jeremy Pope plays Ellis with a body that never stops bracing for the next blow. He absorbs the screaming and the violence and turns inward, and Pope lets you watch the calculation behind his eyes as Ellis decides what to hide. Gabrielle Union plays Inez, his mother, as a corrections officer who has armored herself against her own son. Their final scene together is built on what she refuses to say. Bokeem Woodbine plays drill instructor Leland Laws with a controlled cruelty that knows exactly where to aim. Raúl Castillo plays Rosales, the one officer who treats Ellis like a recruit instead of a target, and he gives the film its only pocket of air.
Bratton writes and directs his first narrative feature with the specificity of a man recreating his own memory. The cinematography by Lachlan Milne shoots boot camp in saturated, dreamlike color that turns institutional spaces into something hallucinatory. A shower sequence dissolves Ellis’s fear and desire into the same frame, and the camera refuses to look away from either. The sound design layers barked commands into a wall of noise that erases the individual. Bratton stages the physical training as both punishment and the closest thing to intimacy Ellis has ever known.
This is a familiar structure carrying an unfamiliar wound. The boot-camp film has rules, and Bratton follows most of them, from the sadistic instructor to the broken recruit who must be remade. What separates this version is that Ellis is fighting for permission to exist before he ever fights anyone else. The film is strongest when it stays inside his loneliness and weakest when it leans on the genre’s machinery to move him forward.