Cynthia Erivo Takes Another Run at Awards Glory with Prima Facie

Cynthia Erivo is a defense attorney named Tessa Ensler in Prima Facie — a young barrister who works in the Old Bailey in London, striding confidently through the century-old halls in sequined sneakers and a legal wig like someone winkingly playacting at being one of the stern bluebloods whose portraits line the walls. The law is more inclusive than it was when they were its sole dictators, but only somewhat. Tessa went to Cambridge, like so many of her peers, but her mother is a cleaner and her father is long gone, and she’s the only Black barrister we see. She’s gotten to where she is by working harder and being smarter than everyone else, achieving an apparent flawlessness that serves as a protective facade. But she also sincerely believes that everyone deserves representation, even the accused rapists she finds herself defending because they ask for women, thinking the optics are better. During cross-examination, she picks apart the testimonials of their accusers gently but relentlessly, highlighting the contradictions in their accounts, and casting doubt on how clearly they made their lack of consent known. “It’s not emotional to me,” she says in the voiceover that lines the film like wall-to-wall carpeting. “It’s a game with rules. The game of law.”

Prima Facie (which premiered at TIFF over the weekend) was a play first, a one-woman show written by Suzie Miller and performed, in its West End and Broadway productions, by Jodie Comer, who won a Tony for the latter. Miller adapted the play for the screen herself, breaking it open and changing its fundamental nature, adding a host of supporting players, among them Daniel Ings as Julian Brooks, the colleague who rapes her while they’re on a date, putting Tessa on the other side of the legal process. The film, which was directed by Woman Walks Ahead’s Susanna White, doesn’t have the claustrophobic strangeness of so many adaptations that have gone from the stage to the screen. But there’s a fundamental abstraction to the theater that allows plays to get away with things that a movie like Prima Facie, which works so hard to place its action in a tangible world, doesn’t. Its fundamental turn, the defense attorney realizing how biased the legal framework for sexual assault is against victims only when she becomes one herself, is much clumsier on screen, a blunt irony that in the film threatens to make Tessa look hopelessly naive.

This is material that invites a big performance, and that really has to be carried by one. And that’s something Erivo is more than capable of delivering while resisting the temptation to showboat, even when the writing lets her down. She allows Tessa’s strength to come through in her self-possession, but doesn’t take the expected route of rendering her aloof or uptight to signal her as an outsider. When Tessa goes out for drinks with her coworkers, she’s the one leading the crew onto the dance floor. The camera catches the glittering array of earrings going up her ear, her manicure, her tattoos, and all the other ways in which her wariness around the class currents she’s navigating haven’t made her feel like she has to take up a particular image of being prim and conservative. Her Tessa is warm and vibrant, someone who may not be from this world, but who’s unapologetic about enjoying the nice things she’s worked so hard for, even as she’s rueful about the pressure her mother (Noma Dumezweni) put on her, and continues to put on her more resistant younger brother Johnny (Toheeb Jimoh). When Julian, whose father is a judge, and who was essentially born into his job, starts flirting, she reacts with pleasure but not surprise — because being wooed by this prince among junior barristers feels like it’s what she deserves. 

And their courtship, which White shoots with a sensuous intimacy, begins with some canoodling at a bar, then progresses into an impulsive hookup during a late session at the office. She depicts the assault, which happens in the middle of the night after a pleasant dinner and consensual sex, with the same closeness, all those sensory snippets turned nightmarish. White does as much as she can to make Prima Facie cinematic, but she’s not an inherently inventive filmmaker. Both she and Erivo ultimately run up against the limitations of the material, which ultimately treats Tessa not as a person but as a vehicle for certain themes. Prima Facie is the kind of film in which the central performance eclipses the whole. It’s also the kind of film that ends with a listing of awful facts about rape and convictions of rapes that inadvertently suggests everything that came before was an elaborate but frustratingly limited PSA. Erivo insists on the three-dimensionality of her character in a way that’s undercut by the text itself. She understands, better than the film itself does, that Tessa exists in a world that fails rape survivors in ways that go far beyond just the legal system.

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