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As I watched writer/director Rebecca Hall ’s adaption of Nella Larsen ’s 1929 novella, Passing , I couldn’t stop thinking about the story in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” where “a colored man” named Eliza Cottor sold his soul to the Devil. The sale made him impervious to consequence, not just for big crimes like committing a murder, but also for small, self-assured gestures that would have certainly gotten his “uppity” ass lynched. August Wilson ’s metaphorical tangent struck me as ironic because, as I wrote in my review, “it seems the only way for a Black man to enjoy the same freedom as his White counterpart in the 1920s is to broker a deal with Beelzebub.” But I understood why Eliza Cottor made that arrangement. He surrendered his soul, but not his identity. In the former scenario, Hell awaits you when you die; in the latter scenario, chosen by this film’s free spirited Clare ( Ruth Negga ), Hell can be visited by the living.

Clare is a Black woman passing for White. She’s convincing enough to fool a lot of people, including John ( Alexander Skarsgård ), her vile, racist husband. Before we meet Clare, we follow her old high school classmate, Irene ( Tessa Thompson ) who, on this particular day, has decided to try her hand at fooling the masses. She nervously enters a White dining establishment and takes a seat. Hall’s camera, emboldened by Eduard Grau ’s stunning black-and-white cinematography, casts a lengthy gaze at Irene’s face under the hat she’s pulled down low enough to arouse suspicion. This beautiful close-up immediately sent my brain to its Blackest depths. “Gurl, there’s no way you’re fooling anybody!” I thought. “Not with  that  nose and mouth!” I started to think about Billy Wilder ’s choice to shoot “ Some Like It Hot ” in black and white so as to mute the fact that Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis are some very unconvincing women.

My temporary disbelief was suspended by a major jolt of reality: Unlike the waiters and patrons surrounding Irene,  I know what to look for  when it comes to recognizing my own people. Some of these “how to notice your Negro” tips I’ve read by Jim Crow-loving idiots weren’t even close to accurate. So I was gripped by suspense during this scene. Hall’s camera takes Irene’s point of view, darting around and quickly noticing Clare. Then the viewfinder rests on her for an uncomfortable amount of time. We sense a possible familiarity between the two, but the uncertainty of the moment hangs in the air.

Clare initiates their meeting, and the two share old memories and their current secret pastime. She’s in New York City as her husband conducts business. Clare peppers the conversation with news and gossip from their hometown. During the chat, Irene mentions her husband, Brian (a superbly understated André Holland ) and the two sons she shares a house with in Harlem. Going one better than a verbal description, John is formally introduced when he interrupts the two friends’ reunion. Thinking Irene is White, and someone who agrees with his worldview, John drops his guard the way people like him always do when they think they’re amongst friends.

What follows is one of Thompson’s best scenes in the film. The horrific dialogue on the surface may distract from what she’s doing, so focus on how swiftly she manages to keep herself in check as her body language almost betrays her. John mentions how much he hates Black people, which we expect. Then he points out that Clare also hates them, but has “been getting darker and darker every year we’ve been together.” This worrisome feature earns her the nickname “Nig,” which John sees as both a term of mockery and endearment. The second syllable of her nickname is implied, and you know damn well it’s with a hard R. Thompson and Negga play this scene as a duet of dueling but equally subtle reactions. For a moment, it appears Irene may out Clare to her boorish man, and the tension Hall and her actors generate is as white-knuckle as any action chase scene.

Though Irene wants nothing to do with Clare after this, she’s cordial when Clare shows up at her doorstep unannounced. Their friendship is rekindled, partially out of curiosity and perhaps more than a bit out of guilt. Without sacrificing her Blackness, Irene lives a rather bougie life in her brownstone. But she’s practically a prude compared to the flapper-like exuberance Clare reveals once she’s able to sneak back to the cookout. During these social gatherings for the Negro Welfare League, Clare is a constant source of fascination, from the Black men who fawn over her light-skinned beauty to a snooty White writer, Hugh ( Bill Camp ), who’s supposed to be an ally but comes off as someone observing Black folks as if he were watching a National Geographic special. When Hugh asks why Clare would go to a dance in Harlem after she’s technically “escaped” her Black existence, Irene responds that she’s there “for the same reason you are. To see Negroes.”

“To see Negroes.” It’s a good line, a well-observed comeback that has sharper teeth than its humorous delivery implies. One is inclined to meditate on how much Clare longs to be amongst her people again, and how her temporary happiness throws Irene’s disposition off-kilter. Things get worse when it appears Brian may have more than a friendly interest in this enigma who wants to have her Black and Whiteness too. And Clare is an enigma, which was my initial problem with “Passing.” As good as Negga is, she’s mostly left to our own devices of interpretation. This bothered me until I realized that Irene is our stand-in. We know as much as she does. As she tries to figure Clare out, and reconcile her own feelings, we’re doing the same.

Hall, Grau, editor Sabine Hoffman , and composer Devonté Hynes do an excellent job of casting a hypnotic spell on the audience. This is a deliberately paced film with enveloping moods that feel like symphony movements. There’s heavy material here, but “Passing” doesn’t belabor its points. When Brian rightfully tries to warn his sons about the racist trouble they’ll face in the world, Irene argues that they should have some innocence in their youth. We understand both arguments even though we know one of them is very, very naïve. The entire film exists in this perpetual state of a deceptively gentle push and pull. It’s a masterful balance of tone. And even though we anticipate the ending, it comes with a surprising amount of empathy and sadness, two things that were always subtly present during the runtime.

“Passing” put me in a very thoughtful mode of allusion and pattern-gathering. On a parallel track, my mind went to other features, from Douglas Sirk ’s “Imitation of Life,” my third favorite movie of all time, to “Watermelon Man,” which is a directly opposite story. The one connection that, like “Ma Rainey,” I couldn’t shake was, of all things, Spike Lee's “ BlacKkKlansman .” Adam Driver ’s character has to pass for a White character played by a very Black John David Washington , and in doing so, he navigates an anti-Semitic and hateful world that would kill him if his Jewishness were revealed. He has it a lot easier than Clare does here, but Lee allows us to navigate his torment. I imagined a similar agony befell Clare in those moments when we don’t see her, when she’s alone with her demons.

My pensive mood eventually led me to my old church-going days, and Matthew 16:26, which says  “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?”  That kind of sums things up here, but to be honest, I wonder just how little worry I’d have about my soul if I got what I wanted in this life. I don’t think I could give up who I was, though. Like I said, that would be some kind of living Hell.

In limited theatrical release today before premiering on Netflix on November 10th.

Note: Site Publisher Chaz Ebert is an executive producer on this film. She had no influence over this review. 

Odie Henderson

Odie "Odienator" Henderson has spent over 33 years working in Information Technology. He runs the blogs Big Media Vandalism and Tales of Odienary Madness. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire  here .

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Passing (2021)

Rated PG-13 for thematic material, some racial slurs and smoking.

Tessa Thompson as Irene Redfield

Ruth Negga as Clare Kendry

André Holland as Brian Redfield

Alexander Skarsgård as John

Bill Camp as Hugh

Gbenga Akinnagbe as Dave

Antoinette Crowe-Legacy as Felise

• Rebecca Hall

Writer (novel)

• Nella Larsen

Cinematographer

• Eduard Grau
• Sabine Hoffman
• Devonté Hynes

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‘Passing’ Review: Rebecca Hall’s Subtle, Provocative Directorial Debut

A superbly performed study of racialized longing and feminine dissatisfaction in 1920s New York, lit by searing intelligence and compassion.

By Jessica Kiang

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It starts in sweltering heat; it ends in freezing weather. And in between, as the temperature gradually drops, Rebecca Hall ‘s “ Passing ,” based on Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, calmly brings the diffuse racial landscape of prohibition-era New York City into crystalline, gorgeously shot focus. This radically intimate exploration of the desperately fraught concept of “passing” — being Black but pretending to be white — ought to be too ambitious for a first-time filmmaker, but Hall’s touch is unerring, deceptively delicate, quiet and immaculate, like that final fall of snow.

On a hot summer day, Irene ( Tessa Thompson ) is downtown on an errand. Her visible discomfort, the way she tries to retract into herself, to hide behind the gauzy brim of a hat that cuts her eyeline in two, is a silent evocation of how uncomfortable she is under the gazes of the white people around her. This time, anyway, she is mostly projecting: No one takes much notice, nothing too alarming happens. But then suddenly, stepping into the full beam of all that projection and sometimes catching the light, there’s Clare ( Ruth Negga ), a childhood friend visiting from Chicago, now unrecognizably glamorous, with a perfect swoop of blonde hair and arched, lightened brows framing silent-movie-It-Girl eyes.

The meeting between the two is a superbly drawn encounter. Irene’s scrambling panic when this white-lady stranger stares her down, then sets off toward her across a hotel tea room, and how it dissolves from her body into relief and then curiosity when she finally registers her old friend, is a brilliant sampler of Thompson’s extraordinarily embodied performance. And Negga, brittle and dazzling, commands attention exactly the way Clare does in every room she walks into; already in that first, insolent stare of hers there is a touchpaper lit on a long fuse toward tragedy.

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Clare has been passing as white for years, chiefly deluding John (Alexander Skarsgard), her loathsomely racist, but rich white husband and the father of her child, whom John believes to be wholly white. But meeting Irene again kindles in Clare a desire to reconnect with the old self she’s been hiding so long. Behind John’s back, she begins to ingratiate herself into her friend’s vastly different life: the handsome Harlem brownstone Irene shares with her tired-eyed, sardonic doctor husband, Brian (Andre Holland), and their two sons, and her work for the community’s Negro Welfare League, alongside well-respected (white) patron and writer Hugh Wentworth (Bill Camp). If Irene is attracted to Clare’s vivacity (and there is definite, if subtle, gay desire between them), Clare is envious of Irene’s stability. No matter that both impressions are false. The things you jettison on the way to the life you think you want are the things you miss most when you get there.

This is a somber story, but it’s filled with unusual light, from the spare, gentle, jazz-piano trills of Devonté Hynes’ score to the glowy, glorious black-and white photography from DP Edu Grau (“A Single Man”). Sometimes Grau’s compositions are strikingly strange: Clare, stretching against the sunlight, or an embrace framed so the image is mostly tree branches and sky. But more often, the lovely illuminated monochrome is brought to bear on ordinary things, wispy domestic details like a crack in a bedroom ceiling or a stirring curtain. The camera seems trained, with graceful, unconscious bias, on the things a woman of that period might have noticed. It’s as though Hall’s distinctly feminine attention propels the imagery toward the swinging hemlines and crooked stocking seams of chattering matrons, or the crease on the back collar of Irene’s flowing morning peignoir (a garment that, like all of Marci Rodgers’s costuming, manages to be both beautiful for us to look at, and real for the character to wear).

In terms of overt drama, “Passing” is perhaps a slender story, but it could only feel undernourished if you don’t share Hall’s fascination with the tides of envy and longing that flow between these women, and if you somehow are not beguiled by their richly imagined interior lives — especially Irene’s. Perhaps surprisingly given that she is ostensibly in the less perilous position, the film is really Irene’s story, with Clare just the newest and, for a time, brightest star in her personal firmament.

This is a choice made explicit at times in Jacob Ribikoff’s expressive sound design, which sometimes makes Irene’s voice a nervous boom in her own ears while all else is dampened and dulcet. It’s like we are inside her head: a radical and difficult place to be. Never does Hall’s evident empathy or Thompson’s deep immersion let Irene entirely off the hook: This fascinatingly flawed woman’s motivations are as often questionable as admirable — her offhandedly classist treatment of her housekeeper Zulena (Ashley Ware Jenkins); her sly complicity in Wentworth’s cultural tourism; the way she pushes her own discontentments onto her husband and pretends they’re his. “You are a lot less content with what you’ve got when she is not here,” she hisses at Brian, implying a jealousy that really only she feels.

If you are attuned to this unusually elusive wavelength, there is plenty of dramatic tension here, but it’s the tension of inevitability, of arcs of deception that, however long, tend toward exposure in the end. And who is to blame? Perhaps as much as anything, “Passing” is about victimhood, and the twisted way we sometimes claim to be the injured party to avoid the unsavory truth that some hurt is self-inflicted – the unavoidable consequence of choices made, deliberately or thoughtlessly, a long time back. At their very first meeting, Clare explains her reasons for passing with flippant, worldly, Zelda Fitzgerald ease: She wants the money and social status she believes she can’t attain otherwise. “All things considered, it’s worth the price,” she declares. But Hall’s beautiful, sharp and intelligent film knows that’s what you say before the debt has come fully due.

Reviewed at Sundance Film Festival (online), Berlin, Jan. 31, 2021. Running time: 98 MIN.

• Production: A Significant Productions, Picture Films, Flat Five production, in association with AUM Group, XRM Media, Film4, TGCK Partners, Gamechanger Films, Sweet Tomato Films. (World sales: Endeavor Content, Los Angeles.) Producers: Nina Yang Bongiovi, Forest Whitaker, Margot Hand, Rebecca Hall. Executive Producers: Oren Moverman, Angela Robinson, Erika Hampson, Michael Y. Chow, Kevin A. Lin, Ruth Negga, Tessa Thompson, Lauren Dark, Daniel Battsek, Ollie Madden, Brenda Robinson, Chaz Ebert, Yvonne Huff, Christopher Liu, Arcadiy Golubovich, Dori A. Rath, Joseph J. Restaino, David Gendron, Ali Jazayeri.
• Crew: Director: Rebecca Hall. Screenplay: Hall, based on the novel "Passing" by Nella Larsen. Camera: Edu Grau. Editor: Sabine Hoffman. Music: Devonté Hynes.
• With: Tessa Thompson, Ruth Negga, André Holland, Alexander Skarsgård, Bill Camp, Gbenga Akinnagbe, Antoinette Crowe-Legacy, Ashley Ware Jenkins.

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“Passing,” Reviewed: Rebecca Hall’s Anguished Vision of Black Identity

By Richard Brody

Rebecca Hall’s directorial début, “Passing,” based on Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel of the same name, is one of the rare book adaptations that brings a literary style to the screen. The film’s sense of style is more than mere ornament; it embodies the confrontation with circumstances—practical, emotional, historical—at the heart of the story. “Passing” (coming to Netflix on Wednesday) is a period piece, set in Harlem during Prohibition, just before the Depression. The movie achieves an ample, resonant reconstruction of that era, but it doesn’t feature colossal sets or give the sense that entire neighborhoods were transformed for the purpose of shooting. Instead, Hall uses sharply defined locations imaginatively and conjures the time through her original way with light, texture, and gesture, all redolent of a storied yet troubled past. The result is an emotional immediacy that’s all the sharper for its subtlety, all the more intense for its contemplative refinement, and that, above all, gives apt expression to the film’s mighty and agonized subject.

The movie stars Tessa Thompson as Irene Redfield, a woman of about thirty who lives in a Harlem town house with her husband—Brian (André Holland), a doctor—and their two sons, one a child and the other on the cusp of puberty. She’s an activist who works as a volunteer for a (fictitious) charitable organization called the Negro League while also running the household. A light-skinned Black woman, she’s taken for white by white people in the course of her errands outside Harlem on a hot summer day. At a hotel café, Irene encounters Clare Bellew (Ruth Negga), a friend from high school whom she hasn’t seen in a dozen years. Clare, too, has light skin—but, unlike Irene, she intentionally passes for white. She’s married to a wealthy white banker named John (Alexander Skarsgård) and lives her entire life amid white society. Clare’s reunion with Irene (whom she calls Reenie) awakens a long-suppressed desire to exist among Black people, to affirm her own identity without shame or fear. Clare imposes herself on the Redfield household, befriends Brian and the boys, takes part in Negro League social events run by Irene—and, in doing so, knowingly confronts the grave risk that John will find out that she’s Black.

The daily anguish that passing causes Clare is revealed during the women’s initial reunion. In Clare’s hotel room (she and John are on an extended visit from their home in Chicago), John comes in and—taking Irene for white, too—makes racist remarks that include the N-word. He calls Clare by a horrific nickname, based on the color of her skin (he takes it for something like olive), which Clare is obligated to laugh at daily. Irene doesn’t challenge the racist epithets, but she does ask John his opinion of Negroes. He responds that he hates them but that Clare hates them even more and refuses even to hire Black maids (unbeknownst to him, of course, not from hatred but from fear). The tension that Clare endures suffuses the film like a stifled scream. When the two women discuss their home lives, Clare says that she and John have only one child, a daughter, and that she refuses to have any more—because her pregnancy was a time of harrowing anxiety lest the baby turn out to be dark-skinned.

The hatred in the air, the ambient racism—spoken and unspoken, acted upon or merely built into the ordinary habits of society—is the basic framework for Hall’s movie. It’s a matter of marital discord between Irene and Brian, who wants the family to emigrate from the United States to Europe in order to avoid American bigotry. Despite her involvement with the Negro League, a civic organization that apparently promotes the interests of Black people, Irene is trying to raise her sons without reference to the terrors that Blacks face in American society—she tries to prevent Brian from telling them about lynchings. (He persists nonetheless and tells them about the murder of John Carter , in Little Rock, Arkansas.) When one of their sons is called the N-word, the experience is as much of a surprise to him as it is a shock.

Clare’s seemingly passive weathering of such hatred prompts Irene to try to keep her at a distance. (Irene later admits to having overlooked the relentless and furious self-control that such a constant performance costs Clare.) Yet once Clare takes the step of self-liberation—at least part time, out of John’s sight—she can’t and won’t stop, and Irene is powerless to get in the way of what she knows to be a disaster in the making. Hall’s greatest directorial inspiration is her portrayal of Irene, who, for all her bustling activity, is passive in her own way—and who, for all her relentless observation, is caught in tangles of passion. In the movie as in the novel, Irene is the story’s main character, its central consciousness, even if it’s Clare whose actions give rise to the central drama. Hall follows Irene throughout, and much of what Hall shows Irene doing is watching, looking, gazing, staring, pondering. The very heart of the movie “Passing” is in Thompson’s eyes, and, as Thompson brings a vast expressive range and emotional energy to her gaze, Hall works a wide variety of changes on the theme. She films Thompson in varied, vigorous, and probing closeups. She offers point-of-view shots in which other characters stare, seemingly into the camera, at Irene. She fills the movie with mirrors and finds Irene unable to escape her own gaze in them, let alone the gazes of others as they turn up alongside her in the reflections. Above all, Hall shows Irene watching with mounting anguish as events in which she is inextricably involved speed toward their inevitable conclusion—and as she is bumped outside herself, watching her own inability to take action on behalf of her friend.

“Passing” is a drama of vision and of inner vision, of appearances and images and self-images, and Hall’s spare and reserved cinematic style serves to emphasize the inward aspect of the action, its crises of consciousness. Her finely textured, tensely poised compositions, filmed in black-and-white, render the drama of desperate desires and unspoken emotions in high and fervent relief. In sharply detailed yet allusive abstractions, Hall turns the Harlem of the nineteen-twenties into a stage of grand philosophical tragedy. Irene’s own reflections, both mental and visual, are joined to quietly imposing depictions of city life, including broodingly expressive views of the staccato rhythms of brownstone architecture and a series of tracking shots (on the Harlem street leading Irene and other characters to the Redfields’ town house) that recur onscreen like a musical motif. There’s also a literal musical motif, piano music composed and performed by Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, that Hall uses to accompany yet another striking, recurring visual figure: sunlight seen through the leaves of trees on the Redfields’ street, a sort of cinematic harmony of culture and nature, of aesthetics and experience, that stands throughout as an artistic and political ideal.

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‘passing’: film review | sundance 2021.

Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga play light-skinned Black women in 1920s New York, navigating the "color line" in different ways in Rebecca Hall's adaptation of the Harlem Renaissance novel.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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Exquisite performances from Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga provide the pulsing, emotionally heightened center to Passing , Rebecca Hall ‘s assured move behind the camera, adapted with great sensitivity from the 1929 novel by Harlem Renaissance author Nella Larsen. “We’re all of us passing for something or other, aren’t we?” muses Thompson’s melancholy character Irene Redfield. This is a dreamily atmospheric evocation of 1920s New York, its bursts of Jazz Age exuberance offset by the contained threat of people being unmasked. It tells an intimate story of two women on either side of the “color line” while undertaking an intersectional exploration of identity in relation to race, gender, class and sexuality.

Hall’s choice of material for her debut as writer-director is elevated by her evident personal investment in the story, having learned years ago that her American maternal grandfather, who died before she was born, was Black passing as white for most of his life. That intense connection pervades every lovingly composed shot of a work that takes an unwaveringly measured, subtle approach to subject matter frequently treated in the past as high melodrama, notably in films like Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life . The veiled contemplation of queer desire, as well as the setting and approach, invite greater comparison to semi-experimental films like Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston .

Release date : Weds., Oct. 27 Venue : Sundance Film Festival (U.S. Dramatic Competition) Cast : Tessa Thompson, Ruth Negga, André Holland, Alexander Skarsgård, Bill Camp, Gbenga Akinnagbe, Antoinette Crowe-Legacy, Ashley Ware Jenkins Director-screenwriter : Rebecca Hall, based on the novel by Nella Larsen

Like that 1989 medium-length British feature, Passing is shot in gauzy black and white, in this case framed in the old Hollywood standard 4:3 aspect ratio to suggest portrait photography but also a strictly contained world of self-imposed boundaries — “safe,” except when it’s suddenly not. Visually, this is Spanish cinematographer Edu Grau’s most expressive period work since A Single Man , his images enhanced by top-notch craft collaborations from production designer Nora Mendis and costumer Marci Rodgers, both of whom provide rich detailing. The underscoring of composer Devonté Hynes’ gentle jazz piano strains contributes further to the vivid conjuring of a lost world.

The effective opening locks in on Irene on a rare trip downtown beyond the more protected confines of Harlem as she half-hides beneath a chic wide-brimmed hat on a sweltering summer day, averting her gaze from every store clerk, sidewalk pedestrian or taxi driver she encounters. Her fear of exposure and humiliation seems palpable as she seeks a reprieve from the heat in the palm-filled tea room of the fictional Drayton Hotel, which is based on the Drake in Chicago. As in Larsen’s novel, the establishment does not have the era’s ubiquitous “No Coloreds” signs, though the white clientele make it clear Irene is there because she has gone unnoticed as she powders down her flushed complexion.

The sharp contrast between the two principal characters is instantly apparent when Clare Kendry (Negga), a close friend from her youth, surprises “Renie” with an effusive greeting. With her breathy, soft-spoken speech and perky blond flapper hairdo, it’s obvious Clare passes as white even before she explains that her banker husband John (Alexander Skarsgård) knows only that she was raised by her white religious aunts after her father died. She explains that since having a daughter, she hasn’t dared try again for the son she always wanted, in case he “comes out dark.”

Irene is nervous, anxious to get away, but Clare is too thrilled to find her again after 12 years to let her go, insisting they go to her suite where they can talk. The early return of John, who has brought them to New York from Chicago on business, reveals him to be an unabashed racist. Clare laughs off his words with practiced nonchalance as he jokes that his wife has gotten darker every day since their marriage, hence his term of endearment for her, “Nig.” He explains that she’s more intolerant than he is, and won’t even have a Black maid. Renie is visibly disturbed by the encounter, even if the warmth John’s wife shows toward her means it would never occur to him that she’s anything but white.

There’s a marked visual switch from Clare and John’s suite, an airy space drenched in white light, to the more textured look inside the Harlem brownstone where Irene lives with her doctor husband Brian (André Holland) and their two boys. The action flashes forward to the fall, when a letter from Clare, postmarked New York, indicates that she has moved back to the city as she hoped. Irene is hesitant to open it, but Brian is more curious, arching his eyebrows at Clare’s florid description of “this pale life of mine,” as she gently chides Renie for exposing her “wild desire” for another life.

When Clare turns up at her door, her petulance over Irene’s non-response to her letter is like that of a spurned lover. But despite Renie’s warnings that she’s courting danger by coming to Harlem, Clare soon settles into giddy happiness at their reunion. She confesses that seeing her old friend again released her loneliness of never being able to be open with anyone; she envies Renie her “good life, free and safe.”

But in Thompson’s unshowy, beautifully internalized performance, Irene is restricted in her own way to the prescribed codes of marriage, motherhood and middle-class respectability. Negga, on the other hand, has an almost Blanche DuBois performative air in her manner, with a fluttering musical lilt as she thanks Irene for her diplomacy toward her racist husband: “It was very kind of you to be so delicate about it.”

When Irene reveals that she’s working with the white writer Hugh Wentworth (Bill Camp) on the organizing committee for an upcoming Negro Welfare League dance, Clare insists on coming, ignoring her friend’s concerns. Brian expresses his disdain for anyone living in denial of who they are, but he’s gradually charmed by the “blond princess from Chicago.” Clare works her beguiling spell on everyone, including the Redfields’ sons and their darker-skinned housekeeper Zu (Ashley Ware Jenkins).

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Hall’s layered screenplay impresses in its ability to reflect, without didacticism, on the elastic borders of identity and the mutable dualities between Black and white, man and woman, gay and straight. A droll conversation between Irene and her friend Hugh at the dance brings up points about exoticism and “emotional excitement” in the somewhat predatory interest of sophisticated white New Yorkers in uptown Black society.

Camp is, well, gloriously camp as Hugh chortles about his wife being whirled around the dance floor by a series of dapper “Ethiopian” men, revealing his own not-so-closeted interest in them by commenting on one “fantastically handsome” dark-skinned dancer who is a magnet to half the women in the crowded room. Interestingly, Hugh is the only one immune to Clare’s allure, perhaps because she doesn’t share his self-infatuation. He’s quietly disparaging about the “poor little me” act of her shadow existence.

Using the apt device of occasional white-outs between scenes, the director navigates a smooth tonal modulation as Irene’s observation of Clare’s happiness at the dance quietly uncovers something missing in her own life and seems to shift the dominant desire from one woman to another. This acquires poignant shades of sadness as Renie shows signs of falling apart, self-medicating during Clare’s absence in Europe and then drifting to the margins when her friend returns, a brighter social butterfly than ever.

Still, the homoerotic undertones in their scenes have a lovely, delicate yearning quality, for instance in one gorgeous interlude where the two women chat on Irene’s Harlem stoop as the sounds of a neighborhood jazz trumpeter’s practice drift lazily through the air. In a moment of shocking forthrightness, Clare reveals she would “do anything, hurt anybody, throw anything away” to get what she wants out of life, having openly expressed earlier that the comforts of money make her ethnic subterfuge worth it. “I’m not safe,” she confesses, a warning that carries startling blunt force.

In a script full of attention to dividing lines both bold and blurred, Hall also weaves in threads about the lines separating children and adults. Irene seeks to maintain her sons’ innocence about the ugliness in the world, while Brian sees it as necessary for them to be aware of the hatred behind racial slurs they hear at school, causing his wife discomfort when he shares graphic details of a lynching in Arkansas. “I’m old enough not to be spoken to like a child anymore,” says her eldest boy. Brian feels strongly about taking the family away from “this hellish place,” while Irene is reluctant to leave America, seemingly more so since Clare re-entered her life.

The drama builds, perhaps inevitably but no less affectingly, to tragedy, taking its cue from Larsen in re-appropriating the trope of the “tragic mulatto” from early African American literature from a more psychologically nuanced perspective. The sorrowful turn brings race firmly to the center of the story, though its violence comes in a development that will be surprising for anyone unfamiliar with the novel.

The catalyst for the final scenes is a chance encounter on the street with John when Renie is out shopping with her glamorous Harlem socialite friend Felise (Antoinette Crowe-Legacy), a willowy stunner whose skin is too dark to escape the racist banker’s notice.

Skarsgård deserves credit for taking on a relatively tiny role, filling in some of the shading missing in the script’s characterization of John both here and in a powerful subsequent scene. And Holland brings depth and intelligence to a man anchored by a firm sense of who he is and the world in which he exists. But the film belongs to the two superb actresses at its center.

Negga’s seemingly blasé attitude when Renie questions Clare on what she would do if John found out the truth about her is a piercing moment of self-revelation behind her studied poise. And Thompson is devastating, conveying with an increasing burden of sadness the ways in which Irene — despite purporting to live more openly than her friend — is defined by a deep sense of longing that in turn defines the film.

Whether this is a one-time passion project or the beginnings of an ongoing move from acting into directing in her career focus, Hall has crafted a work that’s thoughtful, provocative and emotionally resonant.

Full credits

Venue: Sundance Film Festival (U.S. Dramatic Competition) Distributor: Netflix Production companies: Significant Productions, Picture Films, Flat Five, in association with AUM Group, XRM Media, Film4, TGCK Partners, Gamechanger Films, Sweet Tomato Films Cast: Tessa Thompson, Ruth Negga, André Holland, Alexander Skarsgård, Bill Camp, Gbenga Akinnagbe, Antoinette Crowe-Legacy, Ashley Ware Jenkins Director-screenwriter: Rebecca Hall, based on the novel by Nella Larsen Producers: Nina Yang Bongiovi, Forest Whitaker, Margot Hand, Rebecca Hall Executive producers: Oren Moverman, Angela Robinson, Erika Hampson, Michael Y. Chow, Kevin A. Lin, Ruth Negga, Tessa Thompson, Lauren Dark, Daniel Battsek, Ollie Madden, Brenda Robinson, Chaz Ebert, Yvonne Huff, Christopher Liu, Arcadiy Golubovich, Dori A. Rath, Joseph J. Restaino, David Gendron, Ali Jazayeri Director of photography: Edu Grau Production designer: Nora Mendis Costume designer: Marci Rodgers Music: Devonté Hynes Editor: Sabine Hoffman Visual effects supervisor: David Tecson Casting: Laura Rosenthal, Kimberly Ostroy Sales: Endeavor Content

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Passing Reviews

Hall and Thompson create a complex portrait of a woman who is a mystery to herself, prefers to enforce rigid class, sexual, racial and gender norms yet flouts them when repercussions seem to be minimal.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 16, 2023

It's full of terrific performances, especially from Thompson and Negga, and its eloquent atmosphere makes it one of the most visually and audibly pleasing entries of the year.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 25, 2023

Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga carry the plot forward with charm and elegance, as does everyone else in the cast, but these two share such remarkable chemistry that I feel that the slow pacing was actually quite adequate.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Jul 24, 2023

The performances are alluring and emotionally resonated on screen. Hall makes a stand-out debut with Passing and its impact and thoughtful.

Full Review | Jul 21, 2023

Hall has made a movie that explores history through an experiential lens, presenting how such a bizarre existence must’ve felt, hiding in plain sight.

Full Review | Jun 7, 2023

With this feature, Hall proves to be an interesting eye not only behind the camera but also as a writer.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Mar 15, 2023

There’s no easy answer, and that’s where Passing excels— the gray areas.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 21, 2022

A timely—and timeless—exploration of racial identity.

Full Review | Oct 17, 2022

Passing is a challenging but rewarding look at queerness, Blackness, truth, and fiction, featuring two phenomenal performances from both leads.

Full Review | Sep 26, 2022

Aided by a pair of phenomenal performances from Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga, "Passing" is an assured look into the ways that society shapes identity.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Jul 8, 2022

Hall’s film makes Larsen’s work from nearly a century ago come alive in our time on the screen. See Passing. It’s one of the best films of the year.

Full Review | May 19, 2022

The use of black and white helps to emphasize the duality of the characters, leaving open ends and subtle insinuations that we will have to elaborate conscientiously. Full review in Spanish

Full Review | Mar 9, 2022

Irish-Ethiopian actress Negga crafts the year’s most original characterization.... Negga’s genuine emotion transcends Passing and its almost total inauthenticity.

Full Review | Mar 5, 2022

There is not a single composition, camera angle, or cut that doesn’t feel intentional to evoke a feeling or heighten tension, a classical approach to filmmaking that feels rarer and rarer these days.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Feb 23, 2022

Passing is among the most impressive directorial debuts in recent memory, by an actor or otherwise.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 12, 2022

While the script might be too soft around the edges for its story, the performances are magnetic. I appreciate what Hall is trying to do with Nella Larsens novella, but the subject matter is far heftier than the film delivers.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 10, 2022

Written and directed by actress Rebecca Hall, it’s one of the year’s most exciting filmmaker debuts.

Full Review | Feb 10, 2022

By turns stifling and lucid with seduction, Halls debut is impressive, even when its atmosphere sometimes overtakes its pace.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Feb 8, 2022

The black-and-white photography exposes the absurdity of racial codification by reproducing every actors face in scales of gray.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 3, 2022

Everything about this astonishing, just-plain-satisfying film feels like a revelation. Bone-deep subversive yet universal, dripping with a quiet dread yet also beautiful and beautifully wise.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 19, 2022

Netflix’s Passing Is an Unusually Gentle Movie About a Brutal Subject

Rebecca Hall’s film about two Black women sharing a dangerous secret in 1920s America is as delicate as it is tense.

Passing looks like a daydream. Set in Manhattan at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, the film is shot in sumptuous black-and-white. The soft focus of the lens distorts the frame’s edges. Hazy imagery—a fluttering curtain here, sunlight peeking through tree branches there—often fills the screen. And the story at the center appears mellow: Two women, Irene (played by Tessa Thompson) and Clare (Ruth Negga), rekindle their friendship after years apart. Once playmates as children, they evolve as adults into each other’s confidants.

The relationship’s ease, though, is illusory. Irene and Clare are light-skinned Black women who can pass for white, but while the former rarely strays past the color line, the latter has crossed it entirely. Clare has dyed her hair a shimmery blond and shed her origins, to the point where even her husband, John (Alexander Skarsgård), believes her to be white. Her secret transforms the women’s friendship into something stranger: a genuine but risky intimacy, built on their shared knowledge of Clare’s true identity.

Listen to an interview with Rebecca Hall, director of Passing , on The Experiment , a show about people navigating our country’s contradictions.

Listen and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts

Based on the 1929 book by Nella Larsen, Passing , which starts streaming Wednesday on Netflix, is the rare film about race that treats the turbulence of its subject matter with a delicate touch. As much as the story may be about the effects of living in a racist society, not once does the movie depict physical violence by white characters. Instead, it draws tension from the psychological torment of two people who have taken entirely different approaches to their identity, each repressing elements of herself to survive. The film is told not through extravagant set pieces or scenes of emotional catharsis, but through meaningful looks and longing glances between the leads. Though tears are shed and tea sets get shattered, the real force of Passing comes from the anguish that Irene and Clare feel but can’t reveal.

Read: Who wants to watch Black pain?

Much of the credit goes to the first-time filmmaker Rebecca Hall , who’s best known for her work as an actor in thrillers such as The Prestige and The Town . Passing is a deeply personal project for her; in interviews , she’s explained that she began adapting Larsen’s novel after learning that her own Black grandfather had passed as a white man. But although Hall has said that writing the script helped her process her family’s history, the finished product doesn’t feel like the work of a debut director intimidated by a weighty premise. Instead, Hall seems to have grasped the story as a performer would, prioritizing the potency of the characters’ interior lives over the plot. And perhaps given her acting background, she draws from Thompson and Negga a pair of finely tuned and exquisite performances. In every scene they share, they radiate a tender but perilous chemistry.

The two women are seduced and repelled by how the other lives. They’re curious about and enthralled by—perhaps even attracted to—each other, but they’re also ashamed by their envy for what the other has. Irene believes that she’s taken the moral path, having married a Black doctor and settled in Harlem, yet she’s also drawn to Clare’s audacity and welcomes her old friend when she shows up at her doorstep. Meanwhile, Clare considers rewriting her history to be worth the cost of living a dishonest life; John is wealthy and respected, and she can go anywhere she likes as his wife. But her vivacity elides a desperation to immerse herself in the culture she abandoned. Each woman believes the other to have a kind of freedom and safety she cannot obtain.

Hall examines Irene’s and Clare’s duality with meticulous care and obvious compassion. She shoots the women using a boxy 4:3 aspect ratio, making the frequent close-ups of their faces look even closer. Often the two are shown in the same frame or through mirrors, as if they could overtake each other or switch places at any moment. And Devonté Hynes’s twinkly piano score underlines the delicate nature of their intertwined lives. The film, through these graceful flourishes, suggests that the societal lines Irene and Clare believe are being blurred only sharpen as a result of their efforts. After all, race isn’t the only constraint that exists; there are also expectations for mothers, for wives, for women’s sexuality. Slowly, Passing reveals how Irene pushes the limits of her identity to bolster her social status: She snipes at her darker-skinned housemaid and gossips about Clare with a white writer who attends the Negro Welfare League parties she helps organize. Who’s the one betraying her identity more? Who actually leads the more dangerous life?

The tragedy of Irene and Clare rests not in the question of whether the act of passing is morally defensible but in the fact that neither can fully provide an answer. In 1920s America, a repressive world of social norms and niceties, they don’t have the words to express exactly what they feel. But Passing , in Hall and her cast’s deft handling of a relationship that’s equal parts relief and resentment, tells their story in the fragile silences they share.

• Cast & crew
• User reviews

"Passing" follows the unexpected reunion of two high school friends, whose renewed acquaintance ignites a mutual obsession that threatens both of their carefully constructed realities. "Passing" follows the unexpected reunion of two high school friends, whose renewed acquaintance ignites a mutual obsession that threatens both of their carefully constructed realities. "Passing" follows the unexpected reunion of two high school friends, whose renewed acquaintance ignites a mutual obsession that threatens both of their carefully constructed realities.

• Rebecca Hall
• Nella Larsen
• Tessa Thompson
• André Holland
• 172 User reviews
• 181 Critic reviews
• 85 Metascore
• 36 wins & 126 nominations total

• Ralph Hazelton
• (as Amos Machanic)

• (as Amber Pickens)
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• Trivia In casting the two main characters, Rebecca Hall said she had to find two actors that could play either role, because both of them are so seduced by and interested in each other's lives. Ruth Negga agreed, suggesting that if they were doing it as a stage play, the actors could trade roles every other night. Tessa Thompson, however, demurred: "I would never want to play Clare. I love Ruth in this part so much, I wouldn't have done it."
• Goofs The toy cars in the early stage of the movie were not possible to be made in the '20s as the toy cars from that era could not be produced at contemporary precision. Such precision was not possible until the '90s. Toy cars from the '30s usually had blunt axles without transparent windows nor interior.

Irene : We're all passing for something or other, aren't we?

• Connections Featured in CBS News Sunday Morning with Jane Pauley: 10-24-2021 (2021)
• Soundtracks The Homeless Wanderer Written and Performed by Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou Courtesy of The Emahoy Tsege Mariam Music Foundation

User reviews 172

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• Nov 12, 2021
• How long is Passing? Powered by Alexa
• November 10, 2021 (United States)
• United States
• United Kingdom
• Official Netflix
• Giữa Hai Màu Da
• New York City, New York, USA
• Flat Five Productions
• See more company credits at IMDbPro

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour 38 minutes
• Black and White
• Dolby Digital

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Review: Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga illuminate the beautifully complex drama of ‘Passing’

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The closing shot of “Passing,” Rebecca Hall’s sleek and transfixing adaptation of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, peers down from a great height at a courtyard on a cold December night, a vision partially obscured by falling snow and set to the graceful tinkling of piano chords. The image — composed by Eduard Grau in a nearly square frame and a black-and-white palette — has a hushed, frozen-in-time loveliness that feels faintly unreal. You almost expect the camera to pull back and reveal that this piercingly sad story has been unfolding inside a snow globe, trapping its characters in exquisite clothes, repetitive motions and the slow-shifting mores of a society that has left them scant room to breathe.

That society is 1920s New York, a world that Larsen rendered in deft, economical strokes but which emerges here in a blur of cloche hats and flapper dresses, and also in the blasts of jazz and snatches of gossip swirling around a crowded dance floor.

Against this backdrop — stylishly rendered by the production designer Nora Mendis and the costume designer Marci Rodgers — Irene Redfield (Tessa Thompson) and her doctor husband, Brian (André Holland), are the very picture of Black upper-middle-class propriety. They have two young sons, a stately Harlem brownstone and a stable marriage, though not too stable to be knocked off-balance by Clare Bellew (Ruth Negga), an old friend whose sudden reappearance in Irene’s life dredges up long-hidden anxieties and closely guarded secrets.

The most obvious of these secrets, at least to the audience, is kept by Clare herself, a Black woman who for years has been passing as white. So convincing is this particular imitation of life that when they reunite by chance on a sweltering hot day, Irene doesn’t even recognize Clare, and not just because of her striking blond bob. It has more to do with the dazzling effrontery of her manner — the confidence in her gaze, the notes of Hollywood diva and Southern belle in her voice — as she firmly seizes Irene’s attention and insists that they see each other again soon. It’s not exactly the behavior of someone with something to hide. Or maybe it’s absolutely the behavior of someone with something to hide, knowing the most brazen deceptions are often the most persuasive.

Clare likes to play with fire: She’s concealing the truth from John (Alexander Skarsgård), her very rich, very racist husband and the father of their young daughter (who, to Clare’s relief, was born as light-skinned as she is). But regardless of her fear of exposure, she also longs to recover a sense of kinship, of regular communion with Black women and men like those she grew up with — something that Irene, a pillar of her community, is able yet reluctant to provide. A more obvious (though not necessarily less interesting) version of this story might have sympathetically centered on Clare, perhaps with an eye toward rebuking the “tragic mulatto” stereotypes indulged by the once-popular Hollywood subgenre of passing narratives (many of which, like “Pinky,” “Show Boat” and “I Passed for White,” cast white actors as mixed-race heroines).

But “Passing,” a Netflix-acquired standout of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, has something subtler and more complicated in mind. Hall, closely following Larsen’s text, seems less intrigued by Clare’s motives than by the contradictory feelings they awaken in Irene — a mix of irritation, pity, envy and inescapable curiosity that Thompson illuminates with breathtaking precision. For Irene, Clare’s longing for Black companionship smacks of a kind of twisted exoticism fetish, something Irene muses about with her famous novelist friend, Hugh (a typically strong Bill Camp), in scenes that sparkle with cheeky, conspiratorial wit. At the same time, Irene can’t help but begrudgingly admire and even envy Clare’s self-made status, even if it’s predicated on a troubling and surely unsustainable lie.

But then perhaps that status is, as Clare describes it, “entirely worth the price.” And Irene may agree more than she lets on. She’s no stranger herself to the social advantages of perceived whiteness, as we see in the opening scenes of her shopping for her children and enjoying an afternoon tea, each time scanning the room with a carefully lowered gaze to see if the white clientele take any notice of her (they don’t). And those advantages seem to loom ever larger as she and Clare rekindle their friendship over the next several months. You see Irene’s privilege in the authority she casually wields over her darker-complexioned housemaid, Zulena (Ashley Ware Jenkins), and also in her clashes with Brian (a strong, nuanced Holland), who insists, to her chagrin, on teaching their sons the harsh truths of being a Black man in America.

Clare’s regular presence in the Redfield household has a way of both soothing and inflaming those tensions, and Negga invests her with an elfin glamour that seduces everyone in her orbit, the audience included. At times “Passing” takes on the quality of an infidelity drama in which no infidelity is actually committed and you’re not entirely sure who the potential participants are, given Clare and Brian’s mutual affection and the subtler sparks that occasionally ignite between Clare and Irene. The two women attract and repel each other like emotional magnets; it’s as if their contrasting life decisions have made them soul mates.

Hall, who’s spoken of her own experience as a white-presenting woman of mixed-race ancestry, is as in sync with her two leads as you might expect from an actor of her caliber. (“Passing” is her feature writing-directing debut.) She picks up on their contrasting energies, the way Negga eagerly draws the camera’s gaze while Thompson quietly deflects it. But what’s most striking about Hall’s direction is her visual acuity, her gift for composing images that are gorgeous, disorienting and strangely intuitive. She’ll give us isolated closeups of tense little domestic details — a teapot clutched in both hands, a crack running along a bedroom ceiling — but then pull back to show Irene and Clare strolling freely down an uncrowded street in Harlem. (Their challenges are real, but their decisions, she implies, are theirs.) She’s also fond of blurring the focus in the background of a shot, as if to suggest the limitations of perception.

And those limitations may affect the unsuspecting viewer as well. “We’re all of us passing for something or other, aren’t we?” Irene wonders in one of the script’s few nudge-nudge lines, though it does raise the intriguing possibility that “Passing” might itself be passing for something else. You start to wonder if the movie’s ostensible subject, the complexities and contradictions of racial identity, might in fact be something of a smokescreen — a provocative point of entry into a story rippling with more generalized undercurrents of jealousy, fear and discontent.

The idea is fascinatingly underlined by Grau’s monochrome images, in which stark black-and-white differences are both the whole point and somehow beside the point. “Passing” ends with the shock and sorrow that have been foreshadowed from the beginning, but also with a kind of puzzlement, a sense of disquiet. It’s a beautifully chiseled vision of an uglier world, an artifact of a vanished reality that you’re grateful — and yet strangely reluctant — to leave behind.

'Passing'

Rating: PG-13, for thematic material, some racial slurs and smoking Running time: 1 hour, 38 minutes Playing: Starts Oct. 27 at Laemmle Playhouse 7, Pasadena; Los Feliz Theater, Los Feliz; the Landmark, West Los Angeles; Cinépolis Luxury Cinemas, Los Angeles; also available Nov. 10 on Netflix

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Critic’s Notebook

The Real Surprise of ‘Passing’: A Focus on Black Women’s Inner Lives

By making the lesbian attraction between the main characters more explicit, the drama moves beyond mainstream Hollywood’s white gaze.

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By Salamishah Tillet

Midway through the new drama “Passing,” Irene Redfield (Tessa Thompson), the light-brown-skinned, upper-middle-class protagonist, offers a unique insight into her psyche when she says to her friend Hugh, “We’re, all of us, passing for something or the other,” and adds, “Aren’t we?”

Until now, Irene has successfully maintained her cover as both a respectable wife and proud African American woman. But when Hugh (Bill Camp) challenges her by asking why she does not pass for white like her biracial childhood friend, Clare Kendry (Ruth Negga), her response is a revelation, startling me almost as much as it did him.

“Who’s to say I am not?” she snaps back.

In that moment, I realized that what I had considered the B-plot of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel , “Passing,” had risen to the surface in the writer-director Rebecca Hall ’s adaptation, giving us a narrative that remains all too rare in Hollywood today: the interior world of a Black woman’s mind.

When I teach Larsen’s novel to my undergraduate students, I usually start with the obvious: its racial plot and the ways in which Clare finds refuge from racism by identifying as white, only to be tragically alienated from her Black family and community.

But I mainly teach “Passing” through what I think is the novel’s real central conflict: same-sex female desire and the paranoia that begins to overtake Irene, and for that matter Larsen’s story line, as a result of her unconsummated relationship with Clare. In a 1986 essay on Larsen’s novel, the critic Deborah E. McDowell explained why this longing had to appear secondary to the emphasis on race. “The idea of bringing a sexual attraction between two women to full expression,” she wrote, was “too dangerous of a move” in 1929. Instead, “Larsen enveloped the subplot of Irene’s developing if unnamed and unacknowledged desire for Clare in the safe and familiar plot of racial passing.”

Rather than explore the ways that Irene comes into her sexuality, racial passing — at the height of segregation in America — was considered a far more urgent and thus more conventional theme than that of Black women’s inner lives. As a consequence, Larsen’s novel ended up passing, too, eventually taking “the form of the act it implies,” McDowell concluded.

Visually, Hall compensates for the novel’s restraint through stolen glances, flirtatious phrases, and lingering touches and kisses between Clare and Irene. As Irene’s tension mounts, the film externalizes it through other symbols: a loudly ticking grandfather clock, a pot of water boiling over and even her breaking a teapot at a midday social in her home. In these hints, we see both Irene’s desire to break free from the illusion of middle-class domesticity and heterosexuality that she performs, as well as the threat that Clare’s presence poses to Irene’s sense of control.

But, to externalize Irene’s internal thoughts and her sublimated identity, the movie makes what is suggested in the novel far more explicit. For example, Irene’s confession to Hugh never actually happens in the book. Hall opted to amp up that moment, she explained in a video for Vanity Fair, because she wanted “to highlight the latent homosexuality and power dynamics” underlying their shared secret.

But for all that movie does so very well — its subtle swing jazz score; its beautiful black-and-white montages evocative of the photographers Gordon Parks and Carrie Mae Weems; and the delightful cat-and-mouse performances by Thompson and Negga — it deliberately limits how much access we have to Irene. Such restrictions, after having a glimpse of Irene’s full personality, further reminded me of how few stories about African American female sexuality and subjectivity have been told on the big screen.

In other words, at this moment, when Black artists are being celebrated and validated as never before, what does it mean to invest in films that fully move us beyond a racist or sexist gaze and into their innermost thoughts?

To date, such layered depictions mainly are found in the indie sphere, like Kathleen Collins’s recently restored 1982 “Losing Ground” ; Cheryl Dunye’s 1997 autofiction, “ The Watermelon Woman ”; and Ava DuVernay’s 2010 “ I Will Follow You .” Not only do these films meditate on Black women’s struggles to understand themselves as sexual or spiritual beings in the world — but they also do so by acknowledging Blackness as one, not the only, marker of their identities.

“Passing” reminds us of the need for movies to get us past the surface — of skin and sight — and revel in the worlds that Black women create for themselves beyond the gaze of others.

Salamishah Tillet is a contributing critic at large for The New York Times where she has been writing since 2015. She covers popular culture, gender, sexuality, race and politics and is also the Henry Rutgers Professor of African American Studies and Creative Writing at Rutgers University, Newark. More about Salamishah Tillet

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Review: 'Passing' a mesmerizing movie & stunning debut for director Rebecca Hall

In theaters now ahead of its Netflix debut on Nov. 10, “Passing” is not to be missed. You won’t ever forget the award-worthy performances of Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga as two Black women—one of whom is passing for white—as they walk the minefield of racial, class and gender identity.

Based on the 1929 novel by Nella Larsen, “Passing” is rich in period detail about Jazz Age New York, even as its themes of colorism resonate for right now. Shot in black-and-white, the film represents a sensational directing and screenwriting debut for British actress Rebecca Hall ( “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” “The Town”).

The power of “Passing” comes from its delicate balance of ferocity and feeling. Hall sets the scene as Irene (Thompson), a doctor’s wife from Harlem, uses her light skin to escape a sweltering summer day and relax with a cool drink at an all-white Manhattan hotel. Irene feels awkward and guilty at her ruse.

MORE: 'The United States Vs. Billie Holiday' review: Andra Day gives performance of the year

Not so Clare (Negga), a childhood friend Irene hasn’t seen for years, who sweeps into the hotel with her wealthy white husband, John (Alexander Skarsgård), an avowed racist. Clare, a bleached-blond bombshell, is clearly practiced at passing.

Later, in Clare’s hotel suite, the two women catch up. Irene, who Clare calls “Reenie,” lives comfortably in Harlem with her Black husband, Brian (André Holland), and their two, dark-skinned sons and darker housekeeper, Zu (Ashley Ware Jenkins), with whom Irene maintains a condescending distance.

Clare is living a lie. Though she and John have a light-skinned daughter, she fears trying again for a son, just in case he “comes out dark” and her cover is blown. Irene senses danger in the imitation of life that Clare is living. And she’s right.

Hall builds tension as the two women compare their differences. Clare envies Irene’s centered life as a Black woman in a Black community and tries to co-opt it, while Irene longs for Clare’s captivating sexuality and perceived freedom.

Then there’s their own thinly-veiled attraction to each other. Jealousy intervenes as Clare flirts openly with Irene’s husband, who resents his wife’s refusal to deal with America’s racial bonfires, such as a lynching in Arkansas.

What attracted Hall, the daughter of the late British theater director Sir Peter Hall, to “Passing”? The answer is deeply personal. Having learned that her maternal grandfather passed as white—a fact about which her mother, opera singer Maria Ewing, had long been evasive—Hall plunged in.

"I started to think about how I present as this white-passing person, who has all of the privileges and am afforded that because of how I look," said Hall, who poured all these conflicting emotions into her film.

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The result is a mesmerizing movie that marks a stunning debut for Hall, whose work behind the camera is a wonder to behold. And she couldn’t have found two acting interpreters more capable of bringing her humanist vision to life on screen.

Negga, an Oscar nominee for “Loving,” finds the tragic roots behind Clare’s surface dazzle. And Thompson—Valkryie in Marvel’s “Avengers: Endgame and two Thor films—expertly uncovers the beating heart in the emotionally imprisoned Irene. Their artistry is staggering. Just sit back and behold.

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Screen Rant

Passing review: rebecca hall's directorial debut is timely & beautifully crafted.

Quietly intimate and carefully crafted, Passing is both a fitting adaptation and an assured start for this actress-turned-director.

First published in 1929, Nella Larsen's  Passing   shed new light on the biracial experience at a time when the "tragic mulatto" stereotype was still prevalent in society. Now the novel has been given a modern reexamination thanks to Rebecca Hall, who makes her directorial debut with a film adaptation that smartly handles Larsen's story. Hall, best known for roles in movies like  Iron Man 3 and  Professor Marston and the Wonder Women , also wrote the screenplay for  Passing and regards this as a deeply personal project because of her family history. Quietly intimate and carefully crafted, Passing is both a fitting adaptation and an assured start for this actress-turned-director.

The title  Passing refers to the practice where light-skinned Black people pass themselves off as white. It's one that both main characters have indulged in, though one has done so far more than the other. Irene "Reenie" Redfield (Tessa Thompson) lives in 1920s Harlem with her husband Brian (André Holland) and two sons. She only presents herself as white occasionally. One day, during one such occasion, she runs into an old friend, Clare Bellew (Ruth Negga), who has been passing herself off as white for years, to the point where even her racist husband John (Alexander Skarsgård) is unaware of her true racial identity. Though Irene attempts to break off their friendship, Clare continues to integrate herself into Irene's life, leading to complications for all involved.

Related:  Netflix: Every Movie & TV Show Releasing In November 2021

Hall brings an old-fashioned sensibility to her visual style, coloring  Passing in black and white and adopting that boxy (but always classic) 4:3 aspect ratio. Aided by the work of costume designer Marci Rodgers and production designer Nora Mendis, Hall completely transports viewers to the decade of a century ago, which only makes the story's relevance to today more resonant. Larsen's original novel is rich in themes regarding femininity, sexuality, and race, and the movie adaptation does not leave any of them behind. It's particularly interesting to see how Hall handles the queer subtext laced into Irene and Clare's friendship, shown through lingering looks and compliments about Clare's delicate beauty.

For all the thought-provoking conflicts at its center,  Passing is a very quiet movie with an introspective main character. Irene is the de facto lead here, and through her eyes, Clare is almost like a cipher. That's certainly done intentionally, particularly when it comes to how  Passing  comes to a close. At the same time, so much of Irene's own thoughts remain tucked away. Again, one has to assume this was done on purpose, as Irene's conflicting feelings toward Clare are surely just as ever-changing to her as they are to the audience. And to be sure, Thompson plays her with an appropriately repressed air, letting her emotions out only with her eyes and carefully composed facial expressions. At the same time, as  Passing wishes to grapple with so much in such a short runtime (just over an hour and a half), one has to wonder if Hall should've either expanded the story or opened up her characters a bit more. The struggle Clare and Irene face as being women who could exist in either the Black or white spheres is an important one, but doesn't always feel completely explored.

Nevertheless, Hall's cast is more than up to the task of bringing this tale to 2021. Thompson nails Irene's insecurities and buttoned-up emotions. Negga, as  Passing 's other half, is equally excellent as Clare. At first bubbling with flighty excitement over seeing her old friend, then gradually becoming more burdened as she feels torn in her life as a Black women passing as white, hiding parts of herself from the world as a result. Clare is an intriguing figure, and Negga expertly flits between the ease she projects and the heavy emotions weighing her inside. For supporting figures, Holland gets the most to work with as Brian and handles his own inner complexities well. Also, with a limited amount of screen time, Skarsgård makes an impact, though that's also partially because of his character's own actions.  The Queen 's Gambit actor Bill Camp also puts in a nice performance as novelist Hugh Wentworth.

Overall,  Passing is a beautifully crafted adaptation of a novel that still hits home today even though it was published decades ago. Hall demonstrates a clear sense of visual style and makes solid, if not always perfect, work of the themes present in Larsen's story. Thompson and Negga both shine, and fans of theirs will be happy to immerse themselves in these performances. They could perhaps even court some awards gold when the time comes. Those looking for a quietly resonant movie will find some pleasures in  Passing , even if they aren't familiar with the source material.

More:  Middleburg Review: Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Lost Daughter Is Exquisite & Nuanced

Passing   will be released in limited theaters October 27, 2021 before arriving on Netflix November 10. The film is 98 minutes long and rated PG-13 for thematic material, some racial slurs, and smoking.

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Common sense media reviewers.

Nuanced drama about race and identity in 1920s New York.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Positive themes of friendship, community, and self

Irene celebrates her identity as a Black woman. Sh

Irene and Clare are light-skinned Black women who

Discussion of racially motivated violence, includi

Married characters shown embracing and kissing (im

Occasional use of the "N" word.

Adults occasionally smoke cigarettes and drink alc

Parents need to know that Passing is a nuanced drama about two Black friends in 1920s New York, one of whom chooses to pass for White. When Irene (Tessa Thompson) runs into her childhood friend, Clare (Ruth Negga), she learns that Clare has been "passing" for many years, fabricating a backstory and marrying a…

Positive Messages

Positive themes of friendship, community, and self-preservation, especially in the face of bigotry and racism. Deals with complex isssues surrounding race and identity, making it clear that the characters' experiences passing for White don't mean they're any less Black. The way the movie ends shows this to be true. Passing for White offers a false sense of security, and nothing could afford these Black women power and protection from "whiteness."

Positive Role Models

Irene celebrates her identity as a Black woman. She welcomes Clare, knowing that Clare has lived a life of untruths -- hiding her identity as a Black woman and marrying a racist White man. Other characters display racist bigotry.

Diverse Representations

Irene and Clare are light-skinned Black women who grapple with the complicated impact of being able to "pass" for White. Other characters are White and Black. Diversity in age and gender representation, but little in ability or sexuality.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Discussion of racially motivated violence, including lynching. In a heated interaction, one character steps backward and falls out a window, resulting in death. Their body is shown on the pavement from afar.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Married characters shown embracing and kissing (implication is that it leads to sex).

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Adults occasionally smoke cigarettes and drink alcohol.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Passing is a nuanced drama about two Black friends in 1920s New York, one of whom chooses to pass for White. When Irene ( Tessa Thompson ) runs into her childhood friend, Clare ( Ruth Negga ), she learns that Clare has been "passing" for many years, fabricating a backstory and marrying a racist White man ( Alexander Skarsgård ). Clare finds comfort in re-connecting with Irene, who celebrates being Black. Irene must decide whether to welcome Clare into her life -- a life she has carefully curated to validate her dignity and worthiness as a Black woman. Mature content includes use of the "N" word, discussion of racially motivated violence (including lynching), a character taking a fatal fal from a window, and occasional drinking and cigarette smoking. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

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• Kids say (2)

Based on 1 parent review

This film draws you in with its slow and tense releationships

What's the story.

In PASSING, Irene ( Tessa Thompson ) runs into her childhood friend Clare ( Ruth Negga ) at a restaurant in 1920s New York City. At first, the women don't recognize each other, as they've both changed their appearance to be able to "pass" as White women. Irene, who's passing for the day, learns that Clare has been passing as White for many years. Clare introduces Irene to her White husband ( Alexander Skarsgård ), who, ignorant to being in the presence of Black women, quickly reveals his racist hatred of Black people. Irene ventures back to her life in Harlem, where she lives with her Black husband, a doctor named Brian ( André Holland ), their two children, and a housekeeper. Clare writes to Irene, expressing an interest in spending time with her in Harlem, where she feels safe to be her true self. Irene's family and friends are quickly taken by Clare -- her proximity to whiteness makes her deceivingly desirable. And her presence threatens the intentional and protective self-love that Irene has painstakingly nurtured in her world. How long can Clare keep up her lie of being White while leeching off of the culture she has chosen to reject for so long?

Is It Any Good?

Passing is a stylized yet nuanced look into the practice of Black people passing for White. The film is able to explore whiteness in a unique way, since neither of the main characters is White. As a result, "whiteness" plays an abstract character of its own, both alluring and plaguing the movie's Black community. Irene, her husband, and her friends each have their moment of attraction toward Clare: It's the classic dynamic of oppressed people coveting the likeness of their oppressor. Clare represents a privilege that they have likely, if subconsciously, aspired to have. She has access to the power and protection that comes with being seen as White.

But that privilege isn't free. It has caused Clare to relinquish aspects of her true self. Irene, on the other hand, has had to nurture her power and protection on her own. A friendship with Clare means a friendship with someone who hides an identity they both share. If Clare rejects her own blackness, how can she possibly value Irene's blackness? Passing is a beautiful directorial debut from Rebecca Hall. Thompson exhibits restrained intensity as Irene, and Negga plays a lost, reckless, yet inescapably lovable Clare. Sensitivity and generosity touch every element of the production, from the cinematography to the editing, allowing viewers to sit in the prolonged emotion of the characters.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about how the movie handles the idea of "passing." What do you think were the costs and benefits for a Black person who chose to pass in the United States in the 1920s?

Do you agree with Irene or Brian about the idea of talking to their kids about racially motivated violence like lynching?

Why do you think Clare chose to spend so much time in Harlem with Irene? How does reconnecting with Irene affect Clare's personal identity (and vice-versa)?

Movie Details

• On DVD or streaming : November 10, 2021
• Cast : Tessa Thompson , Ruth Negga , Andre Holland
• Director : Rebecca Hall
• Inclusion Information : Female directors, Female actors, Black actors, Latino actors, Multiracial actors
• Studio : Netflix
• Genre : Drama
• Topics : Friendship , History
• Run time : 98 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : thematic material, some racial slurs and smoking
• Last updated : February 17, 2023

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Passing’ on Netflix, an Extraordinary Drama About Racial Identity Starring Ruth Negga and Tessa Thompson

Where to stream:.

• Passing (2021)

Stream It Or Skip It: 'The Strays' on Netflix, a Psych-Thriller Tackling Race and Cultural Assimilation

10 movies that should've been nominated for oscars (and where to stream them), zack snyder, wes anderson, and rebecca hall led 2021's revival of boxy, black-and-white pictures, the best netflix original movies of 2021.

Netflix film Passing marks the directorial debut of Rebecca Hall, who adapts Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel as a lushly photographed, black-and-white melodrama starring Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga. The two actresses play mixed-race women, one proudly Black, and the other “passing,” or living as white; they’re old friends who meet after many years apart, their worlds colliding. The film is a personal project for Hall, whose maternal grandfather was a Black man passing as white for decades while living in Detroit, and her contemplative perspective renders the film one of the year’s most compelling — and challenging — dramas.

PASSING : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: When Irene (Thompson) is in Harlem, she’s Black. When she’s outside her home borough, shopping at a toy store for gifts for her sons, she pulls her hat down low over her brow, covering her hair — she’s passing. She does it mostly as a matter of convenience, and not very often; otherwise, she’s proud of her identity. Her husband is Black, her boys are Black, and she’s the one-woman planning committee for the Negro Welfare League. She leaves the toy store and heads to the Drayton Hotel cafe for a cool drink on a sweltering day. The room is blindingly white in both its lighting and clientele, but nobody bats an eye. It’s the 1920s.

Nobody, except Clare (Negga), a friend from years ago in Harlem, who greets her warmly, calling her “Reenie.” They catch up a little: Irene’s still in Harlem, her husband’s a doctor, she’s a happy mother. Clare is visiting from Chicago, her husband is well-off, she really didn’t like being pregnant with her daughter because she was worried the kid would be born with dark skin. Clare’s been passing for years, and her husband is unaware. It’s a good thing maybe, because he arrives to amplify the tension of this reunion. They banter awkwardly, and arrive on the topic of prejudice. Irene asks John (Alexander Skarsgard) point blank if he dislikes Black people. “No,” he replies, “I hate them.” And then Irene departs, graciously, somehow.

Weeks go by. Clare writes a heartfelt letter to Irene, but she doesn’t reply. It’s postmarked from New York, so she appears to have moved. Irene’s husband Brian (Andre Holland) is frequently exhausted by work, family life and the chill that’s crept into their marriage. They enjoy a nice home with a housekeeper, and parties with other middle-class Harlem friends. Clare shows up at the door one day, upset by the lack of a return letter. She and Irene speak frankly, discussing what makes one “happy, free and safe.” They have a complicated friendship — and it definitely is that, a friendship, which develops further complexities as Clare becomes a recurring guest, an invitee to their social gatherings, their dances and bridge games and family dinners, kind of a third wheel on their marriage. Irene and Clare are strong women, wives and mothers, Black people with light skin. Where is their place in America, in this world?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Let’s remember some extraordinary performances: Negga’s in Loving , about the interracial marriage that became a key component of the Supreme Court’s 1967 ruling that legalized such unions. And Thompson’s in Sylvie’s Love , a terribly underrated mid-century period romance that’s an effervescent joy.

Performance Worth Watching: It’s easy to see Thompson getting a best actress nomination and Negga landing a supporting nod come Oscar time. There’s so much subtly charged social, political, racial and interpersonal subtext to their dialogue and performances, it’s impossible to say one or the other actress is better.

Memorable Dialogue: “We’re all of us passing for something or other.” — Irene sees the big picture

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Race is a social construct, and rarely more so than in Passing , which details the crucial context of Irene and Clare’s identities. Note how the highly saturated lighting in the hotel cafe seems to lighten their skin tone, and how the comfortable confines of Irene’s Harlem home seems to darken it. But this story isn’t wholly entrenched in racial identity — marriage, motherhood and parenthood are addressed in terms that are universal, but also specific to the Black experience. One of the wedges between Brian and Irene is how they’ll explain the world’s harsh realities to their sons; he bluntly reads them a news story about lynching in the South, while she argues for protecting their precious innocence for just a while longer. Another is her involvement in the Negro Welfare League, which consumes enough time — time that would be free for a person not dealing with racial disenfranchisement — that Brian feels neglect. “What about this negro?” he asks, moving her hand to his thigh.

The contrast between Clare and Irene’s characters is a key dynamic. Irene is reserved, poised, softspoken, while Clare is the life of any party, quick to be melodramatic. The film eschews typical narratives by positioning Clare as the more envious of the two; Irene doesn’t yearn to be white nearly as much as Clare desires to return to Black society, and her frequent excursions into Harlem come at substantial risk. Thompson’s performance is an understated descent into a type of madness derived from numerous sources of stress: Her fracturing marriage. A white friend and famous author (keenly played by Bill Camp) whose visits to Harlem she views as little more than tourism. The cruel outside world encroaching on her children. Clare potentially encroaching on Brian, who seems to have taken a shine to this woman. And her inability to acknowledge the ever-so-slight romantic tension she shares with Clare. There’s a major storm brewing beneath the surface of Passing , and it’s only a matter of time before it erupts.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Passing is a visually and thematically rich drama that seems destined for some awards-season glory.

Will you stream or skip Rebecca Hall's extraordinary #PassingMovie on @netflix ? #SIOSI #PassingNetflix — Decider (@decider) November 13, 2021

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com .

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Passing Resists the Histrionics of the White-Made Race Film

By Cassie da Costa

You can’t say that Passing , currently in theaters and on Netflix November 10, is either coming or going. The film, adapted by Rebecca Hall from Black writer Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel of the same name and shot entirely in black and white, embodies the close reading—not necessarily of text, but of gestures and attitudes—that became crucial for Black survival under American chattel slavery, during Reconstruction, and thereafter. At the beginning of the film, a light-skinned woman, Irene Redfield ( Tessa Thompson ), passes for white while doing her daily errands in New York City’s Upper East Side. But when she goes home to Harlem, to her darker-skinned husband, Brian ( Moonlight and The Eddy ’s André Holland ) and very dark-skinned sons, she’s Black again.

This time, though, she doesn’t make it back before being spotted. A pale, blonde woman flirting with nearly everybody across a dining room makes eye contact. “Reenie?” What we see, as the audience, is another light-skinned Black woman recognizing her own. But what the white people in the film see—what even Reenie sees, for several moments—is a white woman. This glamorous, mysterious lady approaches with a glint in her eye. “It’s me! Clare!” Irish actress Ruth Negga plays her with her large, inquiring eyes serving as both a form of assertion and protection, constantly reading the situation . Irene/Reenie is flustered and excited—then, over the course of their re-connection, discomfited and disturbed.

Much of the film inches on quietly, with words, looks, and movements accruing over the course of public and domestic exchanges between the women and their spouses. Clare’s husband John Bellew ( Alexander Skarsgård ) is a jovial racist who takes Irene, and of course his own wife, for white. Brian, a doctor, is suspicious of Clare, and wary of her effect on his family. But it’s Irene’s crescendoing despair, and an internal pain that begins to beam out as a kind of paranoia, that push the film fragilely forward. Passing is a ghost story, and it’s unclear if Clare is even real to herself.

Hall, who is white but whose maternal grandfather was Black (her mother, opera singer Maria Ewing , is mixed-race), quietly yet steadfastly attends to the trouble of race as not only a manufactured idea, but a lived reality in a deeply segregated society. Irene is somewhat of an imperious housewife, firmly commanding her dark-skinned maid Zulena in daily tasks while juggling serious involvement in African American community charity events. Clare, on the other hand, refuses to have a Black maid in the white part of the city (if she did, wouldn’t her husband find her out?). But when she begins frequenting the Redfields’ home, she and Zulena strike up an easy comradery.

The movie’s premise is potentially a titillating one for a certain kind of white viewer who may hope to see the drama of racial strife played out on a grand scale; the number of times directors have remade Imitation of Life , adapted from white writer Fannie Hurst’s 1933 novel, indicates as much. The idea of a Black woman passing for white is the stuff of melodrama, but Hall resists the ease of histrionics.

Passing, instead, emphasizes how casually we can lose ourselves in a world built on varying and opposing perception. The film lingers on the shame felt in finding a place where we don’t quite belong. Clare clearly seeks Black kinship now that she has turned herself over to the conveniences of white life; yet Irene sees Clare’s confidence and envies it, despite knowing that by living as a Black woman, she has greater ease and security in her life than her childhood friend does.

Much of what you see in Passing you’ll miss if you don’t really pay attention. This is, obviously, the entire idea. No matter the language we use or the identities we are assigned or take on, race is not material or fixed—it transforms and distorts.The immediate guttural punches we’ve come to expect from a specific type of movie often never arrive in real life. Larsen herself resisted imbuing her book with a definitive conclusion; its ending seems to whisk away its own premise, and left a fair amount of (white) critics at the time dissatisfied. In fact, Larsen, who was mixed-race and fit fully into neither white nor Black society , disappeared from public view towards the end of her life after moving from Harlem to downtown Manhattan. Acquaintances suspected she may have gone on to pass.

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'passing' — the original 1929 novel — is disturbingly brilliant.

Carole V. Bell

Passing , by Nella Larsen Signet Classics hide caption

Passing , by Nella Larsen

Editor's note: This essay references a book whose title contains a racial slur.

The one thing most people know about Nella Larsen's Passing is that it explores a peculiar kind of deception — being born into one marginalized racial category and slipping into another, for privilege, security, or power. But the significance of Passing isn't found in the surface facts but in the brilliance of its execution: the beauty of the writing, the close character study, and the intense psychological suspense.

For writer-director Rebecca Hall, 'Passing' was a deeply personal project

Like a decades-early precursor to a Patricia Highsmith novel, a sense of sensual glamour, frustration and foreboding pervades Larsen's famed novella. In 1927 Chicago, two light-skinned Black women, childhood friends whose lives took different paths, meet again in a theoretically white space, and a strange friendship is renewed despite the danger that the connection might bring. For Irene Redfield, a proper Black doctor's wife and a doyenne of Harlem society, passing is a petty indulgence, something she dabbles in on occasion, for "the sake of convenience." Her racial dexterity gains her "restaurants, theater tickets, and things like that." But to beautiful, orphaned Clare Kendry, passing is a means of survival. Clare had a home with her white relatives who disdained her race; she wanted something more, and she grabbed it, making a permanent break.

It's an odd reunion of two very different women. One reckless, flirtatious and bold; the other contained, proper and guarded. Clare lives as white in a gilded cage, a fashionable beauty with a touch of what the book calls "the tar-brush," married to a racist boor who would definitely not approve of her past identity or her connections. And yet despite the precarity of her situation, Clare has agency. Her choices are borne of desperation and ambition, but in thumbing her nose at what's expected, she escapes the arbitrariness and slipperiness of racial categories. She also refuses to live by the rules of passing, refusing to fully leave the world she came from behind. When she runs into an old friend, the well-married Irene, it reignites a longing.

In contrast, Irene lives carefully within walls of her own construction. She is always watching what she does and what she says, even afraid her husband will tell her kids about the "racial problem." She's trying to shield them from ugliness, but thinking she can protect two Black boys in Harlem in 1927 from learning about racism is a signal that she's removed from reality.

The contrast, parallels, and interplay between these two women is part of what makes Passing so beautifully constructed. Every choice is finely calibrated. Their interactions are polite, but Larsen has a way of making the simplest observation feel like a prelude to horror:

The words came to Irene as she sat there on the Drayton roof, facing Clare Kendry. "A having way." Well, Irene acknowledged, judging from her appearance and manner, Clare seemed certainly to have succeeded in having a few of the things that she wanted.

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"Seemed" is doing a lot of work in that paragraph. Clare seems to have gotten what she wanted but there's more going on below the surface. Clare's unfettered sexual magnetism and Irene's simmering sexual jealousy adds yet another dimension.

Time and again, alongside the social aspects which remain chillingly relevant, it's Larsen's artistry that leaps out: specifically her masterful handling of plotting, character and mood. She seamlessly blends genre elements into a literary novella about race. The language and iconography of suspense and horror are there from the beginning. Some of the mood-making is subtle; Irene's mindset gets increasingly tense as her liaison with Clare deepens and she begins to feel that the glamorous interloper is threatening the life she's built.

At other times, Larsen is bold, putting the vernacular of the Gothic into Irene's head, invoking "dread," "foreboding," and even "horror." Then there's the foreshadowing in Clare's hysterical speech, how she frames herself as a threat in conversation with Irene: "Can't you realize that I'm not like you a bit? Why, to get the things I want badly enough, I'd do anything, hurt anybody, throw anything away. Really, 'Rene, I'm not safe." Or the cold feeling that runs through Irene on the street, just after she meets Clare's husband:

A slight shiver ran over her. "It's nothing," she told herself. "Just somebody walking over my grave, as the children say."

Published in 1929, during the Harlem Renaissance — a movement its author was deeply entrenched in — Passing caused more of a ripple than a sensation at its release, with critical acclaim far outstripping its sales. (In deliberate provocation, and recalling Carl Van Vechten's controversial novel about Harlem Nigger Heaven of three years earlier, Passing's original intended title was simply Nig .) The influential sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois reviewed it favorably in the NAACP's Crisis magazine. Calling Passing one of the finest novels of the year, Du Bois wrote that Larsen explained "the psychology of the thing; the reaction of it on friend and enemy. It is a difficult task, but she attacks the problem fearlessly and with consummate art."

Nearly one hundred years later, those contributions remain. In 19th and early 20th century literature, the "tragic mulatto" was a stock figure, a person of mixed background whose African heritage and longing for a white existence causes great isolation and suffering. Despite having similar contours, Larsen's novel was a pivotal step beyond those characterizations. Deftly juggling the psychological closeup and the bigger picture, Larsen dips into, contradicts, and complicates that worn image while also bringing to life Du Bois' concept of double consciousness . Larsen shows how intimate choices are bound up in social forces while endowing her characters with indelible specificity. As her last published novel, that is quite a legacy.

A slow runner and fast reader, Carole V. Bell is a cultural critic and communication scholar focusing on media, politics and identity. You can find her on Twitter @BellCV .

• International edition
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Passing review – Rebecca Hall's elegant but inert directorial debut

The actor’s adaptation of Nella Larsen’s novel about race in 1920s Harlem features a scene-stealing Ruth Negga but a disappointing lack of verve

T here’s a great deal of early promise to actor Rebecca Hall’s directorial debut, an ambitious adaptation of Nella Larsen’s much-loved and much-studied 1929 novel Passing, the kind of passion project that would most traditionally be a film-maker’s sophomore effort (after something smaller and personal to prove one’s ability).

In crisp, handsome black and white and with a 4:3 aspect ratio (often used as a gimmick but here feeling both fitting and practical given a smaller budget), we meet Irene or Reenie (Tessa Thompson) somewhat uneasily making her way through a mostly white Manhattan neighbourhood in the 1920s. Finding herself parched or at least in need of some comforting luxury, she heads to the Drayton Hotel, where she bumps into vibrant old friend Clare (Ruth Negga).

The pair, both light-skinned mixed-race women, haven’t seen each other for years, and while Clare is thrilled at the surprise reunion, Irene is more cautious, an initial instinct soon validated when they have a chance to talk in private in Clare’s suite. Clare reveals that she’s been “passing” as a white woman, a decision that’s helped her climb a social ladder and secure a rich husband (an odious Alexander Skarsgård). There’s a delicate push and pull to their initial conversation, both polite and both trying to avoid judgment but when Clare’s husband enters and shows himself to be a vile racist, Irene is horrified and returns back to the safety of her townhouse in Harlem with her loving doctor husband Brian (a reliably charismatic André Holland) and two kids.

Clare soon finds a way back, desperate for friendship but also led by a curiosity about the life she turned her back on, a sense of energy she feels is now sorely missing from her drier new world, stuck with a husband who doesn’t just not like black people but “hates” them instead. The dynamic between the pair is dramatically limitless, an awkward, complex friendship between two women of colour both trying to survive at a time when their country is against them (Brian’s constant horrifying anecdotes of racial violence from the news are brushed away by Irene who needs no reminder of the danger her family faces) in vastly different ways. There’s a seductive comfortability to Clare that Irene envies, the ease with which she’s able to acclimatise, none of the visible second-guessing that Irene experiences, the life and soul of whatever party she’s at, exuding a natural charm but also something rather dangerous too.

Yet as compelling and as complicated as this fraught friendship might be, Hall’s script can’t quite find a way to take it – and the other pieces of Larsen’s novel – and turn them into something deservedly substantial. Hall’s connection to the material is a personal one (her mother is biracial and many generations have “passed” for white) yet there’s a passion missing here, a fire that starts off blazing but fizzles as the story progresses. The slow pace and spareness of the deft first act is delicate and allows moments and characters to breathe but it soon turns into tedium as the script settles into a slightly repetitious nature, a plod that means the moments that do work (usually involving a new slight development in Clare and Irene’s obsession with each other’s identity, always a fraction away from Hitchcockian thriller territory) are lost in the mass that don’t (earlier subtlety giving way to clunky on-the-nose dialogue). There’s an initial quietness to the film that’s full of so much – the things that are thought but can’t be said – but it soon evaporates into emptiness instead.

Thompson, who was so luminous at last year’s Sundance in Eugene Ashe’s wonderful 60s romance Sylvie’s Love , gives a valiant effort here but she’s malnourished by Hall’s limited script which lumps her with too many scenes of looking concerned in a small handful of locations and not enough else. Negga, on the other hand, is allowed to steal scenes as the more gregarious of the pair and she’s deviously good at it, a true star turn from an actor who has deserved to be in so many more things since her Oscar-nominated turn in Loving.

It remains visually elegant throughout, with Hall’s decision to shoot in black and white allowing for some gloriously well-lit one-off shots courtesy of A Single Man cinematographer Eduard Grau. But the choice to repeat the same piece of music throughout starts to tire, and as we reach the final act, Hall skips over some important emotional beats (He did? She what? How come? etc) which leaves the tragic finale not feeling quite tragic enough.

There are so many weighty and often unasked questions in Passing about race and identity – questions that can never be easily answered, if at all, and Hall deserves credit for daring to cover such ground. But the fascinating nature of these issues should have left us with something more to hold on to, more to feel and more to think, a film as worthy of discussion as the knotty ideas it brings up.

Passing is screening at the Sundance film festival with a release date yet to be announced

• Sundance 2021
• First look review
• Tessa Thompson
• Rebecca Hall
• Drama films
• Alexander Skarsgård

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