Wendy Ide 

Girl review – sensitively drawn study of social anxiety

A troubled mother’s close bond with her daughter is threatened by a school friendship in Adura Onashile’s quietly powerful Glasgow-set debut
  
  

Le’Shantey Bonsu and Déborah Lukumuena lying closely side by side in bed, filmed from above, in Girl.
Le’Shantey Bonsu and the ‘remarkable’ Déborah Lukumuena in Girl. Photograph: PR

The Glasgow flat that Ama (Le’Shantey Bonsu) shares with her mother, Grace (Déborah Lukumuena, excellent), is a jewel box of a place, filled with rich colours and the treasured stories they repeat to each other, comforting tales in which the pair wrap themselves each night. It’s a home that Grace, an immigrant attuned to the threats and casual racism of the world outside, would prefer they never had to leave. But Ama forms a friendship with a girl at her primary school and starts to spread her wings – a development that fills Grace with crippling anxiety born out of her own troubled childhood.

Small and slight in scale but sensitively drawn, this thoughtful feature debut from Adura Onashile has a quiet power, much of which is channelled through the wary eyes of the remarkable Lukumuena.

Watch a trailer for Girl.
 

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