RaMell Ross explains why Nickel Boys refuses to "revel" in trauma

RaMell Ross’ Nickel Boys is a staggering work that shines a cold light on a particularly heinous moment in our country’s history. Adapted from Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel of the same name, Nickel Boys follows two young Black men incarcerated in the ’60s at the fictional Nickel Academy, a reimagining of Florida’s very real Dozier School for Boys. Operating through 2011, the Dozier School routinely covered up the physical abuse, sexual abuse, and even murder of its “students.” After the closure, investigators discovered scores of unmarked graves on the grounds, indicating that nearly 100 boys had died in its care.

It’s a horrific bit of history, but Ross’ film—to its benefit—staunchly refuses to “revel” in its characters’ pain. The type of trauma porn it rejects is something “cinema has always done, maybe for a fact of not knowing how to do it otherwise or simultaneously knowing that it’s gonna get people interested and have emotional responses,” the director shared at a New York Film Festival press conference attended by The A.V. Club. Despite this long history, however, Ross said that going in another direction was “actually quite easy… If you say you’re not going to do something there’s a million ways to do it, so it was just coming up with the right ones.”

Shot almost entirely from the alternating POVs of its two central characters, Nickel Boys is about what’s left unseen as much as it shines a light on what does get brought to the surface. Within this conceit, Ross was able to say something more honest about trauma and memory than onscreen brutality would convey. “When people go through traumatic things, they’re not always looking in the eye of evil,” the director explained. “You look where you look and those impressions become proxies, which then become sense memories in your future life that ruin your day, or ruin your year, or ruin your relationships… So we wanted to think about, ‘where do people look?'” 

While the film attempts to answer this question in a dozen different ways, perhaps the most visceral instance is a scene midway through the film where the main character, Elwood (Ethan Herisse), is beaten by one of the school’s administrators (Hamish Linklater). We don’t actually see the lashes as they happen; instead, the film flashes through a series of images of the real victims of the Dozier School, at once creating both a memorial to and testimony of every horrific thing they were subjected to. “To me, it’s more visceral and devastating and memorable than seeing Elwood hit,” Ross shared of the choice.

Tomris Laffly lauded these artistic choices in her review of the film for The A.V. Club: “In a way, Nickel Boys is an extension and expansion of [Ross’ past efforts] to create a truthful archive where Black people tell their own story, in the past and present, and into the future. It’s a rewarding effort at that, a defiantly unconventional art film that challenges our notions of what cinema is and should be.” 

Nickel Boys will have a limited theatrical release October 25, before streaming on Prime Video.