87
Metascore
13 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 100San Francisco ChronicleG. Allen JohnsonSan Francisco ChronicleG. Allen JohnsonDescendant isn’t just necessary. It’s urgent.
- 100The Associated PressJake CoyleThe Associated PressJake CoyleThere is a searching, ruminative dialogue running throughout the film. Brown and editors Michael Bloch and Geoffrey Richman beautifully weave together disparate voices into a meditative chorus.
- 100The New York TimesLisa KennedyThe New York TimesLisa KennedyIf you’ve ever wondered what “holding space” looks like in practice, the director Margaret Brown’s deeply attentive documentary Descendant provides moving examples.
- 90TheWrapKatie WalshTheWrapKatie WalshIt is an elegy wrapped around a true-crime story; an observational social-justice movie intertwined with an historical retelling that finds the universal in the specific. In braiding these strands together, Brown crafts a film that isn’t one thing or the other but instead dares to contain multitudes.
- 90What Descendant demonstrates is how ignoring the real story — the ship sunk to the bottom of the river by people who find its truths uncomfortable — doesn’t just steal people’s history from them. It impoverishes the future. More than that: without facing the past with courage, exploring it without succumbing to emotional panic, there is no future.
- 83The Film StageJordan RaupThe Film StageJordan RaupWith remarkably immediate cinematography and an intimate understanding of its subjects, Descendant becomes an essential ideal of how to tell a community’s story: not through distant talking heads, but capturing moving bodies through land and history, giving a voice to those that can often feel powerless.
- 80Los Angeles TimesRobert AbeleLos Angeles TimesRobert AbeleWith Descendant, Brown wisely chooses to be respectfully, poetically alert instead of imposing, as her use of archival footage shot by Hurston suggests: She’s adding to a pioneering Black filmmaker’s anthropological empathy, updating the conversation, witnessing the witnessers.
- The treasure in this story is not a sunk vessel, as the interviews with its more literal-minded subjects might suggest, but a sense of justice and equilibrium that has been denied to a people that have been passing down their trauma from one generation to the next.
- 75Slant MagazineMarshall ShafferSlant MagazineMarshall ShafferWith Descendant, filmmaker Margaret Brown finds poetry where most would see the opportunity for a polemic.
- 75CNNBrian LowryCNNBrian LowryA bit slow-moving at first, the history gives way to a thoughtful conversation about how best to remember this history and honor its victims, while simultaneously highlighting the modern science surrounding identifying the ship and, thanks to DNA, potentially linking its captives to their descendants.