Director Jessie Barr captures her cousin Jessica Barr in an incredible lead performance in Sophie Jones, a stirring coming-of-age film centered on a young girl whose sexual awakening parallels her mourning over her mother's death.
The Barrs draw from their own personal experiences as adolescents who each lost a parent to cancer, lending the film its potent veracity. Sophie Jones rejects histrionics and linear storytelling to operate more as a series of realistic vignettes, spread out over two or so years, where Sophie struggles to develop her own personality, explores her sexual identity, and navigates a lonely world without her mother. Jessica Barr captures Sophie's internal hurricane of hormones and grief with raw authenticity.
Sophie is haunted by the loss of her mother, smelling her clothes and even going so far as to taste her ashes. Her sister Lucy (Charlie Jackson) attempts to keep everything in balance while their benevolent father (Dave Roberts) shuts down and awkwardly attempts to move on. Sophie masks her pain with dispassionate sexual encounters, which she insists are not as self-destructive as drugs, alcohol, or self-harm, but are still emotionally damaging.
Jessie Barr uses handheld shots to capture her cousin’s open-hearted performance in a very intimate way; her camera is almost an extension of Sophie as she closely follows her in tender scenes of weeping sorrow and erotic catharsis. Sophie's encounters with boys range from sweet and endearing to awkward and devastating. The horrifying loss of virginity scene serves as a warning for young women to carefully vet their sexual partners.
With an affecting interiority, Barr paints one of the most powerful and emotional portraits of girlhood and grief in recent years. It is a stunning directorial debut that features an open-hearted lead performance. The talented young Barrs capture all the shifting emotions of adolescence with a visceral intensity. Highly recommended.