alia shawkat

Director Anthony Chen adapts Alexander Maksik’s novel A Marker to Measure Drift in Drift, a film about a young woman drifting on the edge of starvation a self-destruction on an unnamed Greek island after a profound tragedy. Cynthia Erivo plays Jacqueline, a London educated Liberian who has lost everything in her life and is living hand to mouth sleeping rough by the sea. She wanders the summer tourist populated streets and beaches during the day hoping to find food and possibly small amounts of money from the garish holiday makers. At nights as she makes a bed of sand filled plastic bags, she drifts into her memories both good and increasingly distressing.

Drift is an astonishingly confident and deeply moving film, an unarguable career highlight for both Cynthia Erivo and Alia Shawkat and further evidence that Anthony Chen is one of the most important filmmakers working today. The way that Chen reveals horrors is a virtual masterclass in how to sensitively depict certain acts of violence on screen. This is, in fact, one of the film’s strongest elements: to demand “more” reveals perhaps just how depressingly used to trauma porn we have become, expecting to be spoon fed real-world horrors rather than using basic screen literacy skills to apply our broader general knowledge to poetic allusion.