The Haunting 'Nickel Boys' Turns Us All Into Ghosts

As bewildering and beautiful as it is devastating at its core, Nickel Boys might not immediately present itself as a ghost story, but it very much is. Based on Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning 2019 novel, which fictionalized the real-world horror story of a reformatory school in Florida that abused and murdered students (mostly boys of color) for a century, writer-director RaMell Ross—whose 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening is a full-stop masterpiece—takes a big swing stylistically in adapting this story to the screen.

And it mostly works—mostly—thanks to the strength of the performances that he gets from his cast (most of them teenagers) and the strength of the images he manages to capture. There’s very much a push-pull at work—one that makes more sense the more you think about it after the fact, but which, in the actual experience of watching, can be, at times frustrating.

I speak of first-person POV—Ross and his DP Jomo Fray shoot Nickel Boys from the immediate perspective of two students at the Nickel Academy, beginning with Elwood (Ethan Cole Sharp), taking us in a gorgeous montage straight out of a Malick film from his childhood right up through his transfer to the school as a teenager. The POV then moves over to Turner (Brandon Wilson) once the two young men make friends. (And the POV will then switch back and forth between the two disorientingly as their relationship moves on.) And when I say it’s from their perspectives, I mean that as literally as you can imagine—the camera is their eyes. We see their limbs stretch out in front of us. And any character speaking to them speaks directly into the lens.

This sort of thing’s been tried in the movies before—famously, the first go-round was the 1947 noir Lady in the Lake with Robert Montgomery. But it turns out that an entire film shot in first-person POV is more alienating than it is immersive—the relationship between our eyes and our minds is tricky, and so first-person POV ends up feeling more like we’re looking at something be looked at as opposed to just looking at something ourselves. We can’t just slot ourselves into the eyes of Laura Mars or John Malkovich, try though we may. And so it tends to be used as a film technique sparingly, with moderation, as opposed to a film’s entire run-time—think of the murderers stalking their victims in slasher movies, or even The Substance earlier this year which used the trick to purposefully disorient us.

And it was only with a second viewing of Nickel Boys that I came around to the idea that disorientation is also Ross’ intention here. It read at first to me as an honorable but failed attempt to place us literally into Elwood and Turner’s shoes; to make their experience, full of both beauty and the most unbearable trauma, our own. But once it became clear to me that this is indeed a ghost story we’re being told, I more firmly grasped that the sense of alienation and remove we’re feeling in the audience, floating disembodied across this tale, does have its purpose.

I’m still not sure it 100% works. Funny enough Steven Soderbergh has a ghost story called Presence out in January that I reviewed at Sundance that is shot entirely from the ghost’s disembodied POV too, and that I also had issues with. First-person POV remains too distracting a technique, I think—it calls too much attention to itself. I just find it impossible to get lost within a film that is told this way.

But Ross at least grapples with that discombobulation thematically. The swapping of POV between the two boys becomes increasingly important as their story goes along, with a last act reveal that I wouldn’t dream of spoiling but which sorts things out in a way that made my second viewing coalesce better than that first one did. Do take note of one throwaway moment in the film where Turner actually speaks of ghost stories and the horror of swapping bodies with those worse off than yourself—Ross scatters his clues about gingerly, making the film materialize itself more in hindsight. I suppose that’s what ghosts are. What ghosts do.

With that seven-paragraph caveat about the film’s style out of the way, let’s get into the story. Elwood is a hard-working, intelligent and passionate young man who was raised by his loving grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) and who by no fault of his own gets swept up into a criminal’s misdeeds while on his way to college, finding himself shipped off to Nickel instead. Told with stern key-tapping malignance by the school’s headmaster Spencer (a terrifying Hamish Linklater) the rules that govern this place, it quickly becomes clear that calling this place a “school” and the boys there “students” is generous to the point of obscenity. The boys are the 1960s version of slaves—the hard manual labor of digging ditches, picking oranges, and painting the headmaster’s deck are the only lessons they’ll be receiving. Besides the beatings, that is.

Not long into his time there Elwood makes friends with Turner—cue the swapping POVs—and together the two navigate just not the tricky minefield of the school’s incalcuable malfeasance but also their angry, corruptible schoolmates, who lash out in their own varying ways due to the abuse they’re also suffering. Elwood strains to persevere at keeping hope alive—the light of his grandmother’s love, which Ellis-Taylor shines brightly, certainly helps—while Turner, on his own, is far more cynical. But together the two take good doses of these clashing perspectives from one another—just enough hope, just enough cynicism—that keeps them moving. Or as one of their classmates says with Nickel far behind them—if there’s one thing Nickel taught him it’s how to stay alive.

Because like Whitehead’s novel this is also a story of the present day, where a now adult Elwood (played by the back of Daveed Diggs’ head) is having all of his long-thought-buried trauma dug up, literally, as the news is flooded with a mass grave being unearthed on the Nickel Academy grounds. Ghosts within ghosts, the horrible reverberations of the past echoing up through time and rearranging the here and now—Nickel Boys is haunting in all senses of that word. It presents us with possibility as bright as the sun, and then has it crumble to ash between our out-stretched fingers. It knows the dirt is full of nutrients and horrors, feeding our roots each in equal measure. Perhaps it’s only meant to come together in memory—a dream and a nightmare coalescing around us when we get home and try to sleep. Living in a country capable of these horrors, it’s well we should toss and turn forever.

Nickel Boys screened at the New York Film Festival ahead of its limited release in December. It will air on Prime Video at an unspecified date.