By Josh Bate
An Academy Award nominee with an established reputation for bringing tremendous emotional and theatrical force to her work, Wicked star Cynthia Erivo has demonstrated an ability to inhabit a number of rich, lived-in characters on stage and on screen. Prima Facie gives Erivo perhaps her most demanding film role to date, requiring her to transition from an assured, highly accomplished barrister to a woman psychologically unraveling after experiencing the very kind of crime she has spent her career litigating. Although director Susanna White’s film occasionally struggles to fully exploit the interesting possibilities its premise promises, Erivo ensures there is never any question about the power and importance of the story being told.
Making its world premiere at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, Prima Facie centers on Tessa, a successful British barrister with a high success rate defending men accused of sexual assault and rape. She is exceptionally good at her job, possessing the confidence and courtroom instincts necessary to dismantle an opposing argument and secure favorable outcomes for her clients. Tessa also believes firmly in the principles of the legal system, including the importance of ensuring every defendant receives the strongest possible representation. Her perspective changes dramatically when she is sexually assaulted by a colleague she knows and respects. Suddenly, Tessa is no longer the lawyer dissecting another person’s testimony from across the courtroom. She is the person whose own account is being questioned, forcing her to confront a justice system she previously understood from an entirely different position.
A feature film adaptation of Suzie Miller’s acclaimed one-woman stage play, Prima Facie works from an interesting premise with a fascinating contradiction at its core. Tessa is not an outsider suddenly learning that the justice system can be cruel or imperfect. She knows exactly how these cases work. She understands how evidence is challenged, how testimony is scrutinized, and how defense attorneys can exploit inconsistencies in a victim’s account, as her cutting inner monologue during legal cases demonstrates to the audience. More importantly, Tessa has spent years believing in her ability to operate within that system. Becoming a victim herself should therefore force her to reckon with an enormous psychological contradiction: the difference between what she once understood intellectually and what she now experiences personally.
Unfortunately, Prima Facie leaves some of this potentially interesting material unexplored. There is something inherently fascinating about watching an attorney who has spent her professional life defending the principles of due process suddenly encounter the system as a vulnerable victim, yet, despite gesturing toward this tension, the film never digs deeply enough into it.
The film’s pacing also works against it. White spends a considerable amount of time establishing Tessa’s professional life and formidable courtroom abilities before the assault occurs. Some of this groundwork is necessary in that it gives the audience someone to understand and care about, but it’s all to protracted for its own good, especially given that the inevitable instigating incident is foreseeable from the moment the film starts.
Once the assault occurs, however, Prima Facie becomes considerably more compelling. The film’s emotional center shifts entirely to Erivo, and she responds with a performance that grows more affecting as Tessa’s carefully constructed identity begins to collapse.
Erivo is particularly effective at conveying the disparity between Tessa’s past and present self. She initially projects the confidence expected of a prestigious barrister while subtly communicating the complicated awareness of how her socioeconomic and racial background intersects with her position within an elite profession. Following the assault, those qualities become increasingly fractured. She does not simply play Tessa as frightened or devastateds; rather, she conveys the sensation of someone struggling to recognize herself after an experience that has fundamentally altered how she understands the world.
The courtroom proceedings that characterize much of the final act provide the film with its strongest and most absorbing dramatic material. There is a cruel irony in watching Tessa’s own legal expertise become part of the machinery working against her, while a late-film monologue ultimately crystallizes the argument Prima Facie has been building toward about the systemic failures of the legal system to properly handle rape and sexual violence.
VERDICT: 6.5/10
Making its world premiere at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, Prima Facie is an affecting, at-times devastating legal drama anchored by a magnificent Cynthia Erivo performance, even if Susanna White’s film leaves some of its richest material unexplored. Its extended setup becomes repetitive, particularly because the direction of Tessa’s story is apparent from the outset, but the film gains considerable momentum once the instigating incident occurs and the very legal system she once understood so well turns against her. Erivo embodies the heartbreak, trauma, and complete destruction of self her character undergoes, giving the screenplay considerably more emotional weight than its heavy-handed treatment of acute trauma might otherwise provide.. Despite its pacing problems and a missed opportunity to explore Tessa’s contradictions more deeply, White’s film ultimately shines a much-needed spotlight on the gargantuan legal changes required to make the world a better place.