Film reviews: Clemency | Scoob! | Black Water: Abyss | Saint Frances

Alfre Woodard gives an astonishing performance in Clemency

Alfre Woodard is mesmerising as a prison guard working on death row in Clemency, while the extended universe of Hanna-Barbera in Scoob! won’t be troubling Marvel anytime soon, writes Alistair Harkness

Clemency (N/A) ****

Scoob! (PG) **

Black Water: Abyss (15) **

Saint Frances (15) ***

Criminally overlooked at this year’s Academy Awards, Clemency star Alfre Woodard gives an astonishing performance as the lead in this hard-hitting drama about a black female prison warden (Woodard) presiding over the imminent execution of a black male prisoner (Aldis Hodge) who insists he’s innocent of murdering a police officer 15 years earlier.

Written and directed by Chinonye Chukwu (who became the first black woman filmmaker to have a film win the Grand Jury prize at Sundance last year), the film’s harrowing opening scene – in which an execution goes wrong – sets Woodard’s character, Bernadine, on a soul-searching spiral of self-doubt as her conscience starts throwing her professional achievements, her marriage and her sense of self into turmoil. Underlying her steely professionalism is the unspoken racial dimension of a job that disproportionately incarcerates and puts on death row black offenders for crimes in which there’s reasonable doubt about their culpability – something Chukwu subtly teases out at various points in the film, such as when she juxtaposes a quiet scene in which Bernadine grimly informs Hodges’s character, Anthony, about the procedure for requesting his last meal, with a scene featuring Bernadine’s school-teacher husband, Jonathan (Wendell Pierce), reading a key passage from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man to his students, their individual faces framed in the same way as Hodge’s in the previous scene.

Richard Schiff co-stars as the weary legal aid lawyer fighting to save his client, and though there are opportunities here for the sort of redemptive speechifying that might make this an easier viewing experience, Chukwu doesn’t indulge them, partly because she doesn’t have to: everything you need to understand about where the film is coming from is etched on her star’s face.

Abyss-mal: crocodile B-movie thriller Black Water: Abyss

Kids aren’t particularly well served by Scoob!, an annoying animated reboot of Scooby-Doo that attempts to make the snack-devouring dog and his pesky, villain-thwarting pals Shaggy, Velma, Fred and Daphne more relevant for kids weaned on blockbuster superhero movies. As such, this iteration gives Scooby his own way-back-when origins story, detailing his team-up with Shaggy (voiced by Will Forte) and pulling in other after-school cartoon mainstays like Captain Caveman (Tracy Morgan), Blue Falcon (Mark Wahlberg) and Dick Dastardly (Jason Isaacs) in an effort to create a sort of Hanna-Barbera extended universe. Marvel doesn’t have anything to worry about, though. Pitting the Mystery Inc crew against a Dick Dasterdly now bent on world domination, the save-the-world plot and movie-star voice cast – which also includes Zac Efron and Amanda Seyfried – smacks of desperation. An extended cameo from Simon Cowell just reinforces how out touch this is.

A few Scottish cinemas may have opened this week, but film fans will have to wait until next month for the studios to start rolling out their big blockbuster contenders. In the meantime, there’s Australian horror film Black Water: Abyss, a belated sequel to 2007’s crocodile B-movie thriller Black Water. More of an opportunistic redo than a direct follow-up, the film pits another territorial apex predator against a group of adventure-seekers whose caving expedition turns potentially deadly when flood waters trap them in the feeding ground of said hungry reptile.

Sadly, returning director Andrew Traucki fails to make this in any way tense as he combines seen-it-all-before jump scares with thinly conceived characters that make little sense once their bolted-on backstories are revealed (one’s an asthmatic, another is pregnant, another suspects her boyfriend – who’s planned the trip – of hiding something from her). Further hampered by ropey CGI, the end result is dull enough to make last summer’s alligator opus Crawl seem like Jaws by comparison.

Also available in cinemas is Saint Frances, a likeable indie comedy about a directionless 34-year-old woman who takes a job nannying a six-year-old for the summer. Named Bridget (possibly in tribute to Bridget Jones), and played with unassuming charm by the film’s writer Kelly O’Sullivan, the character and her late coming-of-age crisis may suggest a slick mainstream comedy about getting your life on track, but it’s a much rawer and scrappier film than its cutesy premise initially suggests. For starters, Bridget’s feelings on childhood are complicated by the abortion she’s just had after embarking on a casual relationship with a 20-something waiter. She’s also got an overbearing mother putting pressure on her to start a family “before its too late”; and her lack of a meaningful career is rooted in hinted-at mental health issues that she jokes about in passing but which have been serious enough to cause her to drop out of college and stall her own literary ambitions. All of which means that when she lands the job of nanny to Frances (Ramona Edith Williams), oldest daughter of a lesbian couple (played by Charin Alvarez and Lily Mojekwu) who’ve recently had a new baby and aren’t coping especially well with extra stress, the film uses this set-up to tease out deeper themes in ways that feel not just believably awkward and but also very human.

Though there are some shaky performances among the supporting cast and some of the subplots feel a little underdeveloped too (especially Bridget’s temporary infatuation with Frances’s guitar tutor), this remains a witty and heartfelt calling card for its writer/star. ■

Clemency is available on digital platforms via bohemiamedia.co.uk/clemency; Scoob! is available on digital platforms including Amazon and iTunes; Black Water: Abyss and Saint Frances are available in selected cinemas over the coming weeks

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