************************This review contains mild spoilers****************************
“Give this to your mother.”
“She came back?”
“For you.”
From the moment skin-to-skin contact is first established between mother and child, every matriarch hopes to do the best she can to shield her child from pain or harm. Protecting our children and ensuring they have the opportunity to grow up healthy and flourish throughout their lives is the goal of every parent and is especially true for mothers. This commitment is their greatest strength, but can also be a source of constant worry and anxiety as the desire to protect cannot always be fully realized and achieved. Fast Color uses science fiction to explore this phenomena.
In a distant future ravaged by drought, a woman imbued with telekinetic powers named Ruth (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) is being tracked by government forces determined to study her and learn how to harness her abilities. In order to hide, Ruth flees back to her family farmhouse with her mother Bow (Lorraine Toussaint) and daughter Lila (Saniyya Sidney), all of which she long ago abandoned. The family attempts to understand Ruth’s power while the government agents remain hot on her trail.
Though powered people are the surface level subjects of Fast Color, what the film’s subtext truly aims to explore and present to the audience is the power and sacrifice of motherhood. As we learn as the plot develops, the women in Ruth’s family have been sacrificing for the betterment of their children for generations, with Ruth’s great grandmother purchasing the rural farm to keep the secret of their genetic superpowers secret from the world, allowing the female bloodline to remain safe and out of harm’s way. The family’s smaller story runs true for mothers and their children in a larger, more general sense, particularly in the case of black women, which this Fast Color’s central characters are. Current events have made clear the powerlessness and worry that black mothers must come to terms with when sending their children out of their homes and out into the United States to live their lives, as early as the age of ten. All mothers, regardless of race, wish to protect their children as fully and completely as possible but black women must face the heartbreaking reality that their best efforts often won’t be nearly enough and their children will be forced to face cruelty and danger much soon and much more often than they should. In the film, Ruth’s lineage deals with this hyper-vulnerability due to genetically inherited superpowers and not race, but the matriarchs’ instincts to shield their children through shielding them as much as they can parallels how many black mothers deal with the same issue in reality.
While the connection between mother and child can spark worry and hurt, maternal love is a power all its own that transcends even telekinesis, as we’re shown through the film’s plot. Part of Ruth’s telekinetic powers causes her to suffer from earthquake-inducing seizures that put everyone around her at risk. Her struggle to contain them is the source of her strained relationship with her mother, abandonment of her daughter, and a resulting drug addiction. It is not until later in the film, when recalling the memory of the feelings she felt after saving her infant daughter from harm following a seizure, that Ruth learns to control her seizures. The love and connection Ruth feels toward Lila inspires Ruth to finally defeat her own demons and become a better version of herself not just for Lila’s sake but her own. Fast Color also shows us that maternal love can also include sacrificing much for the well-being of your child, as any mother can attest to. To parent a child is to love someone more than you may even love yourself and preparing to do whatever you feel is necessary to keep them out of harm’s way.
Fast Color was produced on a small budget, making the effects used to display the family’s telekinetic powers are great relative to what was spent. The colorful, striking way the powers are represented on screen, swirling and twisting matter and particles is a well-done way to ensure that the audience received a good bang for the buck. The film’s acting performances are headed by the criminally underrated Lorraine Toussaint, a long-time TV actor whose utilization relative to her immense talent has frankly been an indictment of Hollywood. Her portrayal of family matriarch Bow is strong, determined, and fierce, with her wisdom in how to deal with her family’s gifts and ability to protect them made stark. Saniyya Sidney also shines as young Lila, deftly characterizing a young girl anxious to see the world outside of the reclusive home that has been made for her and reconnect with the mother she’s always wanted to have.
Fast Color is a well-made and produced film that contains some good ideas and quality performances from its actors, but lacks a certain oomph that takes it past a decent watch during in a night in toward something that is truly memorable and sticks with you. The message about the binding love of a mother toward her child has some resonance and isn’t executed badly, it just never rises past anything generic or boilerplate. Lorraine Toussaint provides a typical high quality performance as Bow with the young Saniyya Sidney also performing capably in her supporting role. Special effects can be a tricky thing to figure out but Fast Color makes the most of its budget featuring some great, creative, and eye-popping visuals despite not having a fraction of the financial support of other films in similar genres. All in all, Fast Color has redeemable qualities that make it a worthy watch.
Image: Codeblack Films
