In the Flesh: Rhymes for Young Ghouls

It’s hard to believe Rhymes for Young Ghouls is director Jeff Barnaby’s first feature-length movie. It has its flaws — jumpy pacing, a few awkward cuts, an animated sequence that detracts from the grisly story it accompanies — but its tone is so bleakly human, its shots of nature so assured in their immensity and emptiness, that it has an outsize confidence about it. The film’s opening is among the most crushing and unsentimental I’ve seen in recent years, its depiction of an accidental drunken infanticide so white-hot it’s almost impossible to watch. The film never quite rises to that same raw viciousness, but its specter — both literally and figuratively — never quite fades, either. There is a sense to the entire film that nothing can be put right, that the worst has already happened and everything after it is free-fall.

The movie’s greatest assets are actress Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs as the hardened, struggling teenage drug dealer, Aila, and its unrelenting but ultimately compassionate treatment of substance abuse. The brutal Catholic residential school, St. Dymphna’s, around which much of the film’s plot revolves is seldom seen or discussed in specific terms, but its influence is visible everywhere. In Aila’s father Joseph’s devastated face, in her uncle Burner’s inability to disobey the extortionate Indian agent, Popper, and in the endless struggle to numb and forget which drives so many of the film’s characters to self-medicate into walking oblivion. Sometimes it’s abject — a man lying with his cheek in a puddle of his own vomit, Joseph struggling and wailing drunkenly in a graveyard full of unmarked suicides  — but then, so too is addiction and the trauma and isolation which often lie at its root.

Rhymes for Young Ghouls is a story about colonial violence, but it wisely spares neither empathy nor time for its white perpetrators. The crime of empire is a banal one, as the film shows in its endless scenes of brutal, mechanical lessons delivered at the toe of a boot, and insights into that system’s individual cogs do little to humanize its victims. Barnaby centers the film’s struggle not on the question of why evil happens or what drives human beings to perpetrate it, but on how to survive it, and how to kill it when its guard is down. Its final act of violence is heart-wrenching, an echo of the film’s opening tragedy, and it solves none of the problems afflicting Red Crow reservation or its inhabitants, but it carries deep meaning in its stark, unromantic destruction of the film’s last inch of innocence.