Fast Color

Julia Hart's Fast Color is visually enticing but lacks the aching self-reflection of Hart's wonderful 2016 feature Miss Stevens. It has a few quiet moments of revelation but is mostly ghostly puzzlement and non sequiturs that fall short of nuance and poetry. Gugu Mbatha-Raw stars as Ruth, a young woman with mysterious, seismic powers that appear to have outgrown her control. She comes from a line of similarly gifted African American women (quite literal "black girl magic"). On the run from scientists with murky agendas, Ruth returns to her family home in Texas at a time when the world's resources have been depleted. (It's not explained what forces beyond human wastefulness are responsible). At home is mother, Bo, (the always engaging Lorraine Toussaint) and Ruth's precocious daughter, Lila (Saniyya Sidney), whom Ruth left with Bo after a near catastrophic incident that is augured and depicted in the film but then abandoned, as is Bo's relationship with the local sheriff, played with strange remove by David Strathairn. Mbatha-Raw (an unconventional beauty) is always luminous on the screen and her performance here strikes me as committed but the material (written by Hart and Jordan Horowitz) is frustratingly thin. Much of the story's weakness is its lack of detail, which is ironic for a film whose central conceit is its main characters' ability to deconstruct and reassemble the physical world.