Harriet

Cynthia Erivo delivers really strongly here as the eponymous woman who strives to escape generations of enslavement herself, then work to free her family and her race from the brutal oppression of their overlords. This characterisation of her sheer determination, coupled with a feistiness and courage is indeed well captured but sadly the rest of this is little better than an ordinary television movie. It's not that anyone is especially bad, it's just that none - especially Joe Alwyn's "Brodess" - really cut through. Janelle Monáe doesn't feature often enough to make too much impact and the rest rather follows a precisely produced narrative that failed to inject any real sense of the menace faced by this woman swimming against a societal tide that few had dared before her. It's all just a bit too clean, too sterile and even at it's emotional height - well, I just kept thinking someone was going to give us a song. Maybe it would have had more impact that way? There's also too little emphasis on her work as a "freedom fighter" - a sort of Robin Hood style of character determined to emancipate her people with a bare minimum of violence and spurning the more obvious instincts of revenge upon her former persecutors. The message is there, OK, but it relies far too much on the presumed attitudes of the audience rather than powerfully demonstrate the bleakness of her prospects and the injustice of their psychologically shackled existence. It's watchable enough, but sadly just a little too underwhelming.