This review was originally published on September 7 out of the Venice Film Festival. On June 10, 2024, Origin became available to stream on Hulu . Ava DuVernay’s Origin is both essay film and melodrama, though neither description quite does it justice.
The director has taken Isabel Wilkerson’s influential nonfiction best-seller Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents — a sweeping analysis of discrimination that finds the connections among American racism, the Nazi persecution of Jews, and India’s caste system — and turned it into a historical mystery. It sounds, on its surface, kind of insane. The film is not so much an adaptation of Caste but an attempt to translate it into the vernacular of narrative cinema.
To do this, DuVernay goes back to basics: She presents Wilkerson herself (played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) as the protagonist of this drama and portrays the author’s very personal journey as she’s pulled into this subject, even as her life is falling apart. But she also rifles through history to present case studies from Wilkerson’s research — sometimes through extended sequences, sometimes through mere flashes. The results are incredibly ambitious and, frankly, devastating.
Origin begins with the lead-up to the killing of Trayvon Martin (Myles Frost) by George Zimmerman in 2012, almost like a murder that might kick off a conventional whodunit. Wilkerson, wanting to take a break from writing after an award-winning book, is approached by one of her editor.
