Girl: An unnerving Glasgow tale of repressed trauma

Set in a high-rise flat in Glasgow, Adura Onashile’s Girl concerns the preternatural closeness between a traumatised African immigrant and her daughter. Déborah Lukumuena, who came to prominence as the youngest and first black winner of the César for best supporting actress, stars as Grace, a young, overprotective mother from an unnamed, faraway country.

She and her preteen daughter, Ama (Le’Shantey Bonsu), share a prettily decorated apartment, a bathtub and ritualised storytelling. At night Grace leaves their block to work as a cleaner, a duty that requires careful counting and breathing so that she can manage some unprocessed damage. Ama, with echoes of a fairy-tale princess in a tower, explores her environment with binoculars.

Outside, there’s a distressed urban world that could share a postcode with Andrea Arnold’s Red Road; inside it’s a fable, a sense that is amplified by Grace’s Thumbelina-like explanation for Ama’s origins. Grace’s account relays her lonely time as a young girl. One day, she says, she went to a well and wished for someone who would always be her friend; Ama duly appeared.

The entropy of the small family’s existence is broken when Ama spies a fire in a nearby tower block. She alerts the neighbourhood and comes to the attention of Fiona, (Liana Turner), a same-aged girl who subsequently seeks out Ama’s company.

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Grace responds with increasing paranoia, keeping Ama out of school and visibly succumbing to symptoms of PTSD. Various sympathetic parties, including Ama’s teacher and social worker, try to intervene.

The Scottish-based writer-director of Girl has an extensive background in theatre, as the author of Roadkill and Expensive Shit. The potent claustrophobia that Onashile crafts work as an unnerving evocation of the alienating refugee experience. Working from Onashile’s slightly fantastic script, Tasha Back’s shimmering cinematography ensures that Girl never looks like a typically gritty Glasgow story. An auspicious feature debut for the star of Liz Lochhead’s 2022 Scots-language production of Medea.

Girl is on limited release from Friday, November 24th