Director: Susanna White
Writer: Suzie Miller
Stars: Cynthia Erivo, Daniel Ings, Noma Dumezweni
Synopsis: Follows Tessa, an ambitious defense lawyer. She expertly represents her clients, including those who are accused of sexual assault. However, she finds out that the law does not provide justice after being raped by a coworker.
Popular stage-to-film adaptations have often become the darlings of Academy Awards voters, with over a dozen walking away with the coveted Best Picture Award. The latest to attempt the feat is Prima Facie, based on the one-woman show written by playwright Suzie Miller that landed actress Jodie Comer a Tony Award. Sadly, though, despite a brilliant turn from lead Cynthia Erivo, the film adaptation falls afoul of becoming an ultimately disappointing courtroom drama.
The film follows Tessa (Cynthia Erivo), a young, hard-working British defense barrister who has forged a notorious winning streak in the courtroom and garnered awards for her fierce approach. Via a rather annoying inner monologue that plagues much of the runtime, often spelling out thoughts and emotions that Erivo is perfectly capable of conveying herself, the audience learns of Tessa’s disdain for some of her fellow lawyers who received preferential treatment to get where they are. Meanwhile, she has had to overcome crippling imposter syndrome and being looked down upon to become one of the best in her firm. Her formidable reputation has largely been built on winning sexual assault cases, looking for any loophole the law allows before hounding victims on the stand to secure her clients a victory.
Everything on the surface is going brilliantly, and not just in her career, which is about to take another leap forward via a high-profile job offer. Her personal life is thriving too. Her brother, Johnny (Toheeb Jimoh), has just been told he’s about to become a dad for the first time, while Tessa has started a promising relationship with her co-worker Julian (Daniel Ings), who everyone regards as extremely charming. That is until one night, after the pair share what was seemingly a nice date, Julian rapes Tessa. Now finding herself on the other side of the legal system, with her whole world shattered into pieces, Tessa’s faith in that system is about to face the toughest test imaginable.
The biggest problem with Prima Facie is that it feels like two distinctly different movies stitched together to create one rather messy whole. Suzie Miller also penned the screenplay for the adaptation, which makes the first half feel all the more baffling. For those who go in blind, they could easily think the story is primarily about a Black barrister trying to make it in a whitewashed profession, where she faces prejudice while suffering from debilitating self-doubt. Around an hour of the movie’s 109-minute runtime is dedicated to building out Tessa’s life, to the point that it feels like an entirely different drama from the one that eventually emerges.
That tonal mismatch becomes even more glaring after the rape occurs and the film reveals its central dramatic conflict. Outside of a couple of scenes dealing with the immediate aftermath, it quite literally fast-forwards 1,107 days into the future. There’s no real delving into what happened to the personal and professional life we’ve been a part of up until that point, leaving huge parts of Tessa’s journey open to interpretation.
It’s such a significant gap because the first half spends so much time establishing her career, relationships and complicated attitude toward the very system she will eventually have to rely upon. By the movie’s own admission, the cases Tessa had been working on are like a “taxi rank:” you get what you’re given. It leaves open the uncomfortable question of whether, during those 1,107 days, Tessa continued fighting defense cases for accused sexual assaulters.
Skipping almost three years means the movie jumps over what could have been some of its most fascinating material. How did returning to work affect her? Did her approach to sexual assault cases change? How did somebody who had spent years exploiting weaknesses in victims’ testimony reconcile that with suddenly becoming a victim herself? Rather than feeling deliberately ambiguous, it feels like an entire act is missing.
From there, Prima Facie settles into a courtroom drama centered on Julian’s trial. At least there, the movie does a decent job of portraying the lengths defense attorneys will go to in order to reduce a woman’s claim to nothing. Simon Russell Beale plays Julian’s defense attorney, spinning stories that mess with the jury’s heads and seeking to take advantage of a vulnerable Tessa without outright calling her a liar. It’s an uncomfortable process, but one that feels necessary to highlight some of the gaping flaws in the justice system surrounding sexual assault.
Director Susanna White also delivers some incredibly chilling scenes that will move many to their core. One particular sequence, where Tessa’s mom June (Noma Dumezweni) is seen cleaning Tessa in the bathroom as a way of depicting her washing away the “shame” she feels, is particularly moving and hard-hitting. It’s handled in a way that doesn’t feel preachy and genuinely comes across as sympathetic toward the many victims of sexual assault.
However, those nuanced moments are too infrequent for the subject matter to consistently carry the visceral impact that it should. Particularly during the courtroom sequences, there are moments that feel overly familiar and almost engineered to become an awards player rather than anything outright profound. There was a chance for Prima Facie to dig deeper into both the prevalence of sexual violence against women and the difficulties victims face when seeking justice. Instead, aside from some text at the end highlighting alarming statistics, that wider discussion feels somewhat like an afterthought.
Cynthia Erivo, to her credit, does the very best she can with the material she’s given. The internal monologues often work against her rather than with her, unnecessarily explaining emotions that are already evident in her performance. Even so, she compellingly shows a multitude of different sides to her character. It’s genuinely impressive how she can go from a tender, caring person full of energy to a trauma-fueled individual showing all the signs of dissociating from the world around her. It’s a performance that absolutely deserves recognition but may find itself lost amid the movie’s shortcomings.
It’s abundantly clear what Prima Facie wants to say about a legal system that can make seeking justice an ordeal in itself for victims of sexual assault, something Miller’s play powerfully pointed out. The film adaptation has flashes where that message lands with devastating force, helped enormously by Erivo’s performance, but its decision to skip over such a crucial part of Tessa’s journey stops it from hitting as hard as it should.
That doesn’t mean the film has nothing worthwhile to say. If Prima Facie sparks conversations around how sexual assault cases are handled and encourages meaningful change, its impact could extend far beyond its shortcomings as a movie. But judged as an adaptation and a piece of cinema, there’s a frustrating feeling that a far more powerful version of Prima Facie was sitting somewhere within this one.
