Girl review – sensitively drawn study of social anxiety | Drama films

The Glasgow flat that Ama (Le’Shantey Bonsu) shares with her mother, Grace (Déborah Lukumuena, excellent), is a jewel box of a place, filled with rich colours and the treasured stories they repeat to each other, comforting tales in which the pair wrap themselves each night. It’s a home that Grace, an immigrant attuned to the threats and casual racism of the world outside, would prefer they never had to leave. But Ama forms a friendship with a girl at her primary school and starts to spread her wings – a development that fills Grace with crippling anxiety born out of her own troubled childhood.

Small and slight in scale but sensitively drawn, this thoughtful feature debut from Adura Onashile has a quiet power, much of which is channelled through the wary eyes of the remarkable Lukumuena.

The Glasgow flat that Ama (Le’Shantey Bonsu) shares with her mother, Grace (Déborah Lukumuena, excellent), is a jewel box of a place, filled with rich colours and the treasured stories they repeat to each other, comforting tales in which the pair wrap themselves each night. It’s a home that Grace, an immigrant attuned to the threats and casual racism of the world outside, would prefer they never had to leave. But Ama forms a friendship with a girl at her primary school and starts to spread her wings – a development that fills Grace with crippling anxiety born out of her own troubled childhood.

Small and slight in scale but sensitively drawn, this thoughtful feature debut from Adura Onashile has a quiet power, much of which is channelled through the wary eyes of the remarkable Lukumuena.