Nickel Boys ushers in a new era of POV cinema

It’s been a big year for first-person cinema, even if only one of its three films shot from a character’s point of view will actually be released in 2024. Presence is a new formal genre exercise for Steven Soderbergh, a haunted house movie seen from the eyes of the ghost; Harmony Korine’s EDGLRD seems to be batting zero for two with the first-person shooter home invasion thriller Baby Invasion. Only Nickel Boys, RaMell Ross’ adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and the director’s first narrative feature, is hitting theaters before the year is out. This is perhaps for the best because, by all accounts, Ross’ searing, daring drama about an abusive, Jim Crow-era Florida reformatory school shouldn’t be discussed in the same breath as Korine’s Baby Invasion. 

But while Ross and Korine’s films are linked by an ambition to tell a story in a way that’s complicated, uncommon, and immersive, Nickel Boys looks past the most obvious, self-satisfied instincts of shooting a film in this willfully arduous and carefully designed way. Filmmakers like to set themselves arbitrary formal rules, but more often than not, it restricts emotional investment rather than enhances it; films like 1917 and Here are more stunts than fully realized visions. Nickel Boys is rare not just in its technical competence, but because it’s actively, convincingly engaging with how severe formal restrictions change the way a story is told, and how these limitations aren’t something to hide, but rather investigate.

Shot by cinematographer Jomo Fray, Ross’ images have a breathless, imperfect poetry. They allow us to soak in the ways that the characters—Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herisse), who was sent to reform school Nickel Academy for a crime he didn’t commit, and Turner (Brandon Wilson), a cynical, veteran Nickel resident—view their prison boundaries, internalize their treatment, and dream of freedom. Ross and Fray would often operate the camera themselves, following a strict 33-page shot list that inevitably led to more spontaneous discovery on set. Nickel Boys isn’t content with making the camera nod or shake its head, or making the operator perform complex actor blocking; rather than showing us how different a film feels when shot from first-person perspective, Ross and Fray reveal just how deeply the rules and traits of perspective are baked into the conventions of cinematography. 

The formal immediacy of Nickel Boys compliments a wide-ranging ensemble of Black actors—including Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Ethan Cole Sharp, Luke Tennie, Gralen Bryant Banks, and Trey Perkins—that often deliver their most gut-wrenching moments direct to camera. Coursing through every fractured memory, every flash-forward of adult Elwood (Daveed Diggs) surviving Nickel’s surreal aftermath, and every shred of archive footage bleeding into the story (The Defiant Ones, VHS home videos, and a eugenics public information film all make appearances) is a pulsing, aching score by Scott Alario and Alex Somers—Nickel Boys is a deeply emotional story driven by form rather than narrative, where the character arcs are pinned to the filmmaking equipment and its use. We are not simply watching this tragedy, we feel part of its unfolding.

To understand how Nickel Boys connects to and departs from the strange, gimmicky tradition of first-person POV cinema, one must understand its history. Most POV films were made in the last 15 years, where lightweight, high-quality digital cameras became accessible and competitive alternatives to industry standard equipment. 

Many of the films that have attempted it are clear genre dives. Russian action film Hardcore Henry speedruns a sci-fi shooter with frenetic GoPro parkour and clownish asides from Sharlto Copley, but never transcends the aesthetic of a particularly long YouTube video, dizzyingly blown up for the big screen. Slasher remake Maniac is more technically adept, implicating us in Elijah Wood’s misogynistic, scalp-shearing kills by planting us in the depraved, voyeuristic driver’s seat (or cuck chair). But despite some inventive and invasive technical choices, most of the sleaze and scuzz of the exploitation story is lost through the overly mannered camerawork. Lady In The Lake is a weird, mishandled Philip Marlowe adaptation from Hollywood’s Golden Age—director and star Robert Montgomery shot the noir mystery from Marlowe’s point of view, abandoning the character’s distinct physicality in favor of heavy, unnatural, gliding camera moves. 

The most accomplished antecedent to Nickel Boys’ substitution of camera lenses for human eyes is Gaspar Noé’s Enter The Void. Fifteen years after its premiere, the film still packs a tremendous, hallucinatory power as Noé’s camera weaves through heightened consciousness, astral projection, and the afterlife with a mix of purpose and fluidity. But Enter The Void is an experimental outlier, and its intense, explicit nature kept it far away from mainstream prestige.

Apart from Noé and Ross, POV cinema took genre works and refracted them through a gimmick. The best possible reaction to them was, “What a cool way of showing us something we’re already familiar with.” Rarely did they convince us that the story had to be told in a way that, more often than not, called attention to its artifice rather than immersing us in the vision. What do we gain from the deliberate camera blocking, obvious hidden cuts, and visual effect shots that paint over the seams rather than opting for a more traditional camera style that simply suggests an emotional, expressive link between the camera’s operations and the characters’ internal worlds? Films aren’t not shot from an imagined person’s point-of-view, after all. The strict formal rules that these POV films follow may be uncommon, but they’re just enhancing the presence and instincts of a constructed viewer that can be found in any moving image work. Isn’t every film shot from the perspective of a ghost?

But while all films use their cinematography to imagine a ghostlike ideal viewer, POV films reduce that invisible, intangible presence to a single pair of eyeballs, limiting how abstract and expressive the camera can be within the parameters of one person’s behavior, anatomy, and movement. In the filmmakers’ deliberate attempts to mimic something natural, the audience tunes into how unnatural the process has always been; the effort to create something instinctively real reveals the innate artificiality. 

A movie can never make us forget that we are watching a movie, and therefore not someone’s actual perspective, but there are tons of specific tells and imperfections that remind us that we are not actually inside someone’s head. Human eyes are never still, they never move in clean, smooth trajectories, their ability to focus is much messier than the expertise of your average focus puller. Depth perception, a fisheye-like angle of view, and the complex combination of other senses completely transforms the ways human beings process the world around them that film cameras cannot dream of replicating. 

If the camera is lightweight and practical enough to actually be attached to an operator’s head, then servicing the gimmick becomes a priority over aesthetic beauty. To watch Hardcore Henry is to see a hurried, half-realized vision, not because time and energy wasn’t put into the blocking and shot design, but because the intention of that effort was to make people notice the seams of the POV style as little as possible. But a camera lens does not faithfully record the world around us. It interprets it, carefully framing our world with different degrees of color, motion, and focus to offer a heightened mood or reflection. It is not about seeing the world as it is, but making us consider how we see the world.

Therefore, the point of POV cinema should obviously not be to convince us that the film we’re watching is someone’s point of view, but that experiencing a story from a construction of a character’s vision adds something to the material—that the way these characters see the world is as important as what happens around them. This is probably why so many of the best uses of first-person in cinema are restricted to single scenes, or reserved for characters whose face we’re not supposed to see: The opening scene of Halloween, the shark perspective shots in Jaws, the disk-printed memories in Strange Days, or the heavy-breathing killer in Black Christmas. It’s telling that all four examples are from horror films or adopt a killer’s perspective—many of them withhold whose POV we’re sharing until it’s most surprising and satisfying—because adopting the eyes of a voyeur or predator puts us on edge, confronting our own desire for thrills and spectatorship, and when used in short doses, adds a sense of dissociation despite being fully immersed in a character’s head.

Crucially, we first see these point-of-view shots in the first few moments of their films, often in the opening scene. The perspective sequences are attention-grabbing, a break from convention, a sharp injection of suspense that may not be replicated throughout the whole film, but does prime us for an experience that will disorient, confront, and illicitly thrill us. We’re not expected to engage with these characters on a sincere emotional level—in fact, the potent abject nature of a killer is exactly why showing us their perspective has such a chilling effect.

Nickel Boys, by contrast, places us in the perspective of victims of violence. It’s an arresting, unexpected change to POV convention that makes us voyeurs to victimization and makes us feel the impact of violence far more than being in the perspective of a killer, almost as if the audience’s presence makes the character more of a target to abuse. The harm we witness in Nickel Academy is not lurid and thrilling, but non-sensationalized and systemic, which alters our relationship as a spectator and heightens the complicated intimacy we have with our protagonists. We may be seeing the abuse, but only they are feeling it; we are so close, but separated by the restrictions of fiction. One torture device used at Nickel is a customized laundry machine that lashes the students/inmates—its mechanical sound haunts Elwood long before we’re brought to the outhouse where it inflicts its abuse. Our morbid, fearful curiosity of what this industrial weapon looks like is inextricably tied to the awful circumstances through which we would get to see it. We will only see the laundry machine when our characters are physically brought to it, and they will only see it themselves when they are being abused by it.

The structure of Nickel is expressed through Ross and Fray’s camera in less violent ways, and these quieter moments showcase the thoughtful formal dexterity of Nickel Boys in ways that prompt reflection rather than distress. When Elwood first arrives at Nickel, he notes the segregated white boys tossing a football in an open field, the camera tracing the sweeping arc of the ball from some way off. It’s a faithful recreation of the way that our eyes focus on (or get distracted by) movement, but the position of the camera also enhances character and story—the freedom of the ball, the ritual of play isolated in a punishing environment, and Elwood’s distance from it all. There’s no need to cut back to Elwood’s face, Kuleshov effect-style, to read the character’s frustration and yearning after this observation of enforced prejudice. The camera has become an extension of the performer, because the character has not been built around the necessity to be a camera. 

After spending most of the first act exclusively in one character’s POV, Ross and Fray introduce Turner to Elwood in a cafeteria scene that plays once from Elwood’s perspective and then, Persona-style, repeats from Turner’s. Cutting between the boys’ perspectives proves an ace up Nickel Boys’ stylistic sleeve, but Ross and Fray eschew it here, instead replaying the conversation from opposing angles in long takes rather than mimicking more conventional shot-reverse-shot coverage. Replaying the dialogue lets us zero in on both Turner’s perspective and Herisse’s performance as Elwood, but it also self-consciously exposes flaws in the camera-as-eyes approach: Elwood is more jittery than the camera, more prone to tics. Repeating the cafeteria scene but now looking at Elwood rather than with him syncs up Elwood and Turner’s perspective, but also implies that they may feel closer to each other than we can ever be to them.

Elwood and Turner see Nickel Academy differently. One is more accustomed with Nickel’s routine cruelty, the other is an outsider to its rhythms. This is a type of perspective complexity only available if you break away from a single character’s vision—cutting between the boys’ points of view doesn’t just give Herisse and Wilson more freedom to emote on camera, but the simple act of cutting back and forth between two characters gives Nickel Boys a livelier energy than if we were strapped into the choreographed long takes that define the stagey action in lesser POV films—and works in tandem with Elwood and Turner’s characterization rather than reducing them to camera operators.

Elwood’s more indignant nervous energy is contrasted by Turner’s wealth of experience and reluctance to push too hard against Nickel’s boundaries—boundaries reinforced by the rectangular limits of the frame. When faced with such aggressive disparity, do you feel restless and anxious within these new borders, or do you seek comfort within the punishing limits imposed on you? The contrast between the characters, not to mention the moments where Turner meets Elwood’s loving grandmother Hattie (Ellis-Taylor), where he’s reminded of the outside world trying to breach Nickel’s non-sanctuary, is one reason why they’re attracted to each other—the camera turns the boys’ barrel-of-the-lens stares into soul-piercing intimacy and makes broken eye contact notably intentional. 

No other character in Nickel Boys is afforded the same formal tension and symbiosis as Elwood and Turner, because we don’t see anyone else’s point of view—these characters don’t just see each other as different from everyone else, they see differently from everyone else. Nickel Boys indicates their connection will undergo a severe and lasting metamorphosis in the flash-forwards to Elwood’s post-Nickel life, where the camera is seemingly mounted to Daveed Diggs, a foot or so from the back of his head, never revealing his face. The back of a head is one of the most exciting ways to frame a person—Why aren’t they looking at us? What about them has become closed off?—and in the context of Elwood and Turner’s friendship, the change in composition is uneasy. There’s a palpable dispossession from looking at Elwood’s back when the camera has, until now, exclusively stood in for his own gaze; maybe Elwood became aware of the audience’s presence inside his head and grew uncomfortable with letting us in.

During the story’s present, cutting between Elwood and Turner strengthens the connection between performer and camera. Cutting from a character’s point of view to a shot of the character’s actor puts us inside his head and outside it all at once, giving a textured impression of how focused and powerful the gaze can be while getting to read the expressions of the gazer. When someone’s point of view fills a whole cinema screen, when their eyes are lent stunning composition and color timing, the social and political power of not just what they see, but their power of sight, is more immediately convincing. But Nickel Boys often interrupts this power by revealing the person attached to the eyes. Despite the burning expressive details across the actors’ faces, we are abruptly reminded of how abuse and institutionalism has subjugated these young men, robbing their bodies of the sharp, urgent agency implied by their gazes.

A turning point in Elwood and Turner’s imprisonment is the annual boxing match between the best candidates from the white and Black cohorts. But before the match begins, Elwood and Turner know the highly anticipated fight has been rigged, as they’ve covertly witnessed their abusive teacher Spencer (Hamish Linklater) instruct Griff (Luke Tennie) to take a fall in the third round and concede to the white fighter. Primed with this depressing information, the film begins the match scanning the cleanly segregated benches through the boys’ bitter gaze, another reminder of Black agency unjustly quashed in even trivial situations. But as the second round rolls into the third, Griff doesn’t give up the fight, defiantly hammering into his opponent. 

The Black students are ecstatic, but Turner even more so—he knows that Griff’s symbolic resistance has real, tangible stakes. We watch the fight from Turner’s frenzied, low-angle view at the edge of the ring, electrified by the promise of Griff’s victory. “Turner,” Elwood says, and we see what he sees, the reality outside the frame of Turner’s gaze, a young man drunk on the hope of cathartic agency, myopically omitting the grim, structural reality outside of the spotlighted ring that won’t let their celebration last longer than this single moment. “This isn’t the fight,” is Elwood’s sobering reminder. Elwood isn’t reproving Turner to undermine his friend’s emotions, but rather to contextualize that which is inside and outside of his friend’s perspective.

Feelings invariably condition the way we see and process the world, how we attach meaning to actions and decode symbols around us. It’s up to a POV filmmaker to express these emotional states in the formal qualities of the perspectives they shoot from, but also reflect the flaws and limitations brought about by those same states—not just their aesthetic limits, but ones of perception too. Neither Elwood or Turner’s ways of seeing give a complete picture of the world around them, or even of themselves, and in their mission to reconstruct history through a reconstruction of how it was witnessed, Ross and Fray connect the limitations of their technology with the limitations of their characters’ perception. We watch POV films like Hardcore Henry and Maniac because there is an implicit belief that seeing through someone’s eyes makes the drama more real, the stakes more intense, the emotions more reachable—that the experiential is a purer way of telling a story. It’s a clear fallacy that, rather than being a crutch for Nickel Boys’ formal inventiveness, is central to how it explores racial dispossession in America.

Seeing history doesn’t grant you power over it, even if what you see is put into a type of record or action; painstakingly, empathetically imagining how a victim of racial injustice saw their imprisonment will always reveal the gaps that remind us how removed we are from their suffering. Nickel Boys marks a new era for POV movies, not just because it’s the most technically accomplished entry yet, but because the same traits that once relegated the POV film to mere novelty here elevate it to aching pathos.