Isabel Wilkerson (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) is still basking in the success of her latest book when she begins developing her next major thesis: the origin of racism in modern society, a thread she believes can be traced back to the Dalit caste in India.  While working on this project, her life is unfortunately upended.  The tragic death of Trayvon Martin commandeers the news cycle.  Her husband, Brett (Jon Bernthal) passes away while the pair are in the middle of searching for the right senior living facility for her mother, Ruby (Emily Yancy).  Emotionally drained and at the bottom, she focuses that energy into writing her book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. 

Ava DuVernay writes and directs Origin, an unconventional adaptation of Isabel Wilkerson’s 2020 novel.  Premiering at the Venice International Film Festival, Origin already had a distribution deal through Neon as it competed for the Golden Lion and later the People’s Choice Award at Toronto.  Running 135 minutes, there is a lot of ground to cover, both narratively and informational, and DuVernay relies on a handful of vignettes as Isabel makes various discoveries to support her thesis.  This kaleidoscopic quality is an interesting approach, and the result is a film unlike any other as it balances its two identities and many strands. 

The main action of the film follows Ellis-Taylor as Isabel, and it is a difficult role, but she finds moments where everything gels and she can foster enough sympathy with audiences that we stay with her even when the film teeters more into a documentary stream of conciseness.  Her character is almost entirely defined and haunted by tragedy so it is far from a feel-good film or even an inspiring story as it plumbs the depths of human cruelty, so each step closer Isabel gets to unlocking her thesis, Origin examines but another example of prejudice.  It is an important story that works far better on the page than on the screen because this adaption takes on the structure of an anthology.  As with all anthology films, they are only as strong as their weakest entry, and because the other stories that Isabel researches are far more cinematic and emotionally varied than her own arc, much of the runtime is spent treading in water. 

Her arguments play out in flashbacks that have a similar quality to the opening vignette about coincidence in Paul Thomas Anderson’s sweeping character drama, Magnolia (1999).  The difference here is that the racism being portrayed is not coincidental, but systemic.  The first of two main threads which she weaves in the middle act follow August Landmesser (Finn Wittrock), a German man and Nazi soldier who was punished for his relationship with Irma Eckler (Victoria Pedretti), a Jewish woman. This drama is intercut with a story from the Jim Crow South following Elizabeth (Jasmine Cephas Jones) and Allison Davis (Isha Blaaker), a married pair of anthropologist researchers studying how racism coursed its way through their community even though slavery was already outlawed. One such example that they uncover is how Al Bright (Lennox Simms), a young baseball player, was not allowed to participate in his team’s pool party on account of him being black. These stories are all focused on “othering.” The othering of the Jews under Hitler’s rule, which Isabel posits is built off of the framework of the othering experienced by those brought to the United States as part of the slave trade, itself an extension of the othering of the Dalit caste in Indian culture. It is a bold claim when she first says it and she is even asked by her cousin Marion (Niecy Nash) over a plate of BBQ to “explain it to me like I am four,” but the film – because of Wilkerson’s own work – is able to state and defend its thesis and that is nothing short of an accomplishment. 

The problem occurs when we switch back to Isabel because she is barely a character in a project that is barely a film. Origin works best in its flashbacks and that structure lends itself to a multi-part docu-series more so than a narrative. Instead, and without belittling the actual tragedy that the actual Wilkerson experienced, Isabel’s struggles are a plumber (Nick Offerman) looking like he just walked off the SNL stage wearing a red MAGA hat and being pressured by her agent to cover the Trayvon Martin news cycle and the venomous rhetoric that filled the airwaves in its wake. Again, not belittling the actual tragedy, its sensational recreation opens the film, later weaves in the actual 911 call as Matthew J. Lloyd’s camera follows the hoodie-wearing Myles Frost from behind the windshield of a pickup truck, and finally is cut up into a montage of other heinous acts, no less than a scene of sexual assault under the decks of a slave ship. In comparison, Isabel’s writer’s block and the struggle to form her thesis and sell her house all pale next to these other plights. Her big moment at the end is putting it all together on a whiteboard, a success that writers are all too familiar with, but it is inherently uncinematic.  The power of this moment is further dwindled because the actual tying together of these themes happened earlier in the film, though, and that responsibility was given to Suraj Yengde, a Dalit professor playing himself, who tells the story of Bhimrao Ambedkar (Gaurav J. Pathania), a Dalit activist, and selected scenes are very effective in proving Isabel’s point, but she is absent from the screen. It is appreciated that the film does not turn the spotlight away from these issues and instead graces Isabel as that would seem self-congratulatory, but as a narrative, we want to see our heroes succeed, and that simply is not the case here. 

Origin is simply not that kind of film, rather it is a very difficult exercise in its investigative nature and it takes a big swing at how to change how we think about a film’s structure. Unfortunately, it just does not work because we do not have an investment in Isabel. This is through no fault of Ellis-Taylor’s performance, but really because the script feels wholly uninterested in her, too, despite giving her the lion’s share of the screen time. When compared to a film such as She Said (2022) which broke apart the protections around Harvey Weinstein and exposed the long history of abuse he systematically carried out while the head of Miramax and later The Weinstein Company, the difference is that the former has, in comparison, a much narrower story to tell, but on the page it built its cast of characters out far more than DuVernay does here. While it stumbles as a narrative, Origin is still an important film in the topics it covers, specifically how it covers them, and it offers a new line of thinking about how we ended up how we are as a society today. It is not offering answers, and to be fair, no film alone can solve our problems, but what it does do is it offers a rich opportunity to discuss and learn and grow from those who are different than us so that we can try to move closer to seeing ourselves as a unified human race because when we are together, we cannot be othered.