After a somber and frustrating first act, I was surprised and curious to realize I was watching Jim Henson’s Rashomon Babies. A film that unfolds in an elementary school across three different points of view, slowly folding out to reveal what’s really going on. It’s a pretty great, complicated, and intelligent script that had me guessing the whole way through.

The film begins with a single mother finding out her child has been abused by a teacher. The school is weirdly closed off, unwilling to give her the satisfaction she wants. And then, yes, the story reverses and is told from multiple points of view until we find out what’s really going on.

This is, at one point, a very frustrating film… and then it’s a miscarriage of justice, and then its a lyrical tale of friendship. It’s all of these things while also being smartly written and complicated, asking us to keep our sympathy and empathy in play.

If I have any complaint, it’s that we get three stories but only one ending. Clearly the ending they chose was the focus they wanted… but I wanted to know what happened to the other characters. Their storylines mattered too… but I guess they filmmakers decided that’d be too long a tale and irrelevant to their point. Fair enough.

But that’s ultimately ok. I enjoyed how much they wanted me to puzzle out the story and gain empathy for the characters. How the story gets recontextualized multiple times and doesn’t offer easy answers. It’s a pretty great film.

Score: 87