Metacritic reviews

Brother is a portrait of Black youth pitted against forces beyond their control.

This decades-spanning drama — a lyrical and probing adaptation of David Chariandy’s novel about two siblings coming of age under the care of their Trinadadian single mother in the suburbs of Toronto — is so unstuck in time and shot through with raw emotion that its clunkier moments tend to function like tender maps back to the heart of the matter.

Despite the background noise of police brutality, gang violence and financial peril, it is the altogether more intimate elements of Brother that drive the drama.

Aside from well-trodden social politics, Brother’s examination of the myriad ways we respond to grief is what sets it apart from other films that delineate the Black experience.

The ultimately sparse dramatic elements here feel more suited to a short film; in a feature-length production, they become too thin to support the big feelings and weighty themes the movie wants to leave us with.

There is power in the inescapable, in the dreaded endpoint of becoming news after a lifetime spent fearing it—mourning it. But despite its length and artistic competence, Brother’s lack of affecting specificity displays rather than embodys grief.

Although he retains the sweep of the novel, Virgo struggles to replicate its observational texture and the tension is undone by an atmospheric vagueness, full of pregnant pauses that only stretch out the run-time.

Heavy with grief the film may be, but it’s always a beautiful mourning.