‘Drift’ (2024) Review – Where To Go From Here

Big-budget disaster flicks, epic sci-fi stories, and explosive action films are fine, but movies are at their greatest when they can tell a human experience from an unfamiliar perspective to yours, and make you empathize with a world and a life far different from your own. This is what Singaporean director Anthony Chen accomplished with his English-language debut film, Drift. Based on the book A Marker to Measure Drift by Alexander Maksik, Chen’s film stars Cynthia Erivo in a career-best performance as Jacqueline, a West African refugee who has found herself penniless and homeless on a Greek tourist Island.

For much of the film’s runtime, we witness Jacqueline’s daily life, as she steals sugar packets for food and collects sand from the beach in order for her to sleep on. She washes her clothes with soap every day and sneaks whatever leftovers she can get from restaurants. She isn’t just drifting on this island; she is drifting through life. However, Jacqueline isn’t a drugged-out panhandler, and Erivo doesn’t play her that way. We get glimpses of Jackie’s eloquence and educated background. When she plays coy trying to get a reservation (that she knows she can’t pay for) at a restaurant or when she tells the police that she’s a journalist, so she doesn’t get arrested, Jackie is still resourceful despite her downtrodden nature. 

We come to learn that she spent some time in London, even picking up the accent, which causes the tourists and the natives to question where she’s from. It is in these flashbacks to Jacqueline’s early life where we find the heart of the film, and its themes of acceptance, trauma, the power of friendship, and the immigrant experience.

You don’t know what another person has been through. What could be behind their smiles, their laughs, their tears, and especially their silence. We see this through Jackie’s friendship with an American tour guide named Callie (an always welcome Alia Shawkat). Through this relationship, we begin to see Jackie slowly step out of her trauma and regain a sense of normalcy. The film is limited on dialogue though, as Jacqueline tends to only speak when spoken to, and even then, many of her scenes with Callie are more than often the women sitting together in silence, occasionally sharing glances or a laugh. 

While that can seem frustrating to some, it encompasses why this relationship is necessary for Jacqueline. She has dealt with people taking pity on her, and she knows it doesn’t last long. It’s those who will see you as a whole person, going through something who will just sit with you, and allow you to go through it until you feel comfortable. Those are hard and rare people to find, which is why the friendship becomes so valuable not just to these two women, but to the audience as well.

Erivo gives such heft and care to this character that we all want her to recapture what was lost, find comfort in the kindness she receives, and find a way to live life rather than just drift through it. But this is where the empathy comes in. We see flashbacks to Jacqueline’s time with her parents in West Africa; it is a slow build to realize they are in a time of war. The Second Liberian Civil War, which ran from 1999 to 2003. Tied closely to the brutal notorious reign of Charles Taylor, former President and warlord of Liberia. This situation impacts Jacqueline’s life in the most heinous and inconceivable way. When the full scope of her trauma is revealed, the understanding of why she is the way she is becomes painfully clear, and we all understand how difficult overcoming that level of devastation can be. It puts in perspective the entire film we’ve witnessed at this point – a woman so captured by the events of her past that it will be near impossible to ever escape them.

This is where we need kindness and empathy for the stories in the world we didn’t know existed to be able to understand where people are coming from and what they’ve escaped just to be able to exist freely, even if they are just passing through.

Drift is currently playing in select theaters courtesy of Utopia. The film will expand nationally on February 23, 2024. 

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYLgGGuFcVI]