88 min | NR | March 24, 2023 | Sideshow / Janus Films
Two African kids in Belgium pose as siblings to survive. He has papers. She does not, and the system has no use for a girl who cannot prove who she is. The bond is real even when the paperwork lies.
Tori is a young boy from Cameroon granted asylum in Belgium. Lokita is a teenage girl from the same continent who claims to be his sister so she can win the same papers. They are not blood. The lie is the only family either one has. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne build the film around a single brutal economy. Lokita owes money to the smugglers who brought her, owes money to her mother back home, and owes her freedom to a forged identity that the state keeps testing. The film is about how undocumented people get ground into cash for everyone who touches them.
Joely Mbundu plays Lokita with a flat, watchful exhaustion. She sings a karaoke duet in the opening scene and then spends the rest of the film negotiating, lying, and absorbing abuse to keep the arrangement alive. Mbundu never plays for sympathy. She plays a person doing math. Pablo Schils plays Tori as quick and fearless in a way that reads as survival rather than charm. He crawls through ventilation ducts and counts cannabis plants without flinching. Alban Ukaj plays the chef Betim as a predator who hides his cruelty behind ordinary tasks.
The Dardenne brothers shoot in their familiar handheld style and refuse a musical score almost entirely. The camera stays close to the actors and walks with them through grocery stores, grow houses, and parking lots. The absence of music strips out any cue that would tell you how to feel. You hear footsteps, engines, and breathing instead. The brothers write the screenplay as a chain of transactions, and the editing cuts on action rather than emotion, so each scene ends the moment its business concludes.
This is the Dardennes working in their narrowest register. The film is lean and direct and never lets the audience look away from the machinery that turns a child into a commodity. The schematic structure is the limitation and the point at once. Every door Lokita walks through leads to another person who wants something from her. The brothers know exactly what they are indicting and they prosecute it without mercy or padding.