Descendant
Netflix | Release Date: October 21, 2022 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
87
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 13 Critic Reviews
Positive:
13
Mixed:
0
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
RogerEbert.comOdie HendersonOct 21, 2022
Descendant is worth seeing no matter who you are. For viewers like me, however, it engenders the reality that, no matter how hard anyone tries to whitewash history, our stories will forever continue to be told in full, by us and for us. Read full review
100
The New York TimesLisa KennedyOct 21, 2022
If you’ve ever wondered what “holding space” looks like in practice, the director Margaret Brown’s deeply attentive documentary Descendant provides moving examples. Read full review
100
The Associated PressJake CoyleOct 20, 2022
There is a searching, ruminative dialogue running throughout the film. Brown and editors Michael Bloch and Geoffrey Richman beautifully weave together disparate voices into a meditative chorus. Read full review
100
San Francisco ChronicleG. Allen JohnsonOct 19, 2022
Descendant isn’t just necessary. It’s urgent. Read full review
90
VoxAlissa WilkinsonOct 21, 2022
What Descendant demonstrates is how ignoring the real story — the ship sunk to the bottom of the river by people who find its truths uncomfortable — doesn’t just steal people’s history from them. It impoverishes the future. More than that: without facing the past with courage, exploring it without succumbing to emotional panic, there is no future. Read full review
90
TheWrapKatie WalshOct 21, 2022
It is an elegy wrapped around a true-crime story; an observational social-justice movie intertwined with an historical retelling that finds the universal in the specific. In braiding these strands together, Brown crafts a film that isn’t one thing or the other but instead dares to contain multitudes. Read full review
83
The Film StageJordan RaupOct 21, 2022
With remarkably immediate cinematography and an intimate understanding of its subjects, Descendant becomes an essential ideal of how to tell a community’s story: not through distant talking heads, but capturing moving bodies through land and history, giving a voice to those that can often feel powerless. Read full review
80
The GuardianLauren MechlingOct 21, 2022
The treasure in this story is not a sunk vessel, as the interviews with its more literal-minded subjects might suggest, but a sense of justice and equilibrium that has been denied to a people that have been passing down their trauma from one generation to the next. Read full review
80
Los Angeles TimesRobert AbeleOct 20, 2022
With Descendant, Brown wisely chooses to be respectfully, poetically alert instead of imposing, as her use of archival footage shot by Hurston suggests: She’s adding to a pioneering Black filmmaker’s anthropological empathy, updating the conversation, witnessing the witnessers. Read full review
75
LarsenOnFilmJosh LarsenDec 19, 2022
Whenever someone wants to downplay historical atrocities, Descendant suggests, it’s because they’re also trying to cover up injustice in the present day. Read full review
75
CNNBrian LowryOct 21, 2022
A bit slow-moving at first, the history gives way to a thoughtful conversation about how best to remember this history and honor its victims, while simultaneously highlighting the modern science surrounding identifying the ship and, thanks to DNA, potentially linking its captives to their descendants. Read full review
75
Slant MagazineMarshall ShafferOct 3, 2022
With Descendant, filmmaker Margaret Brown finds poetry where most would see the opportunity for a polemic. Read full review
70
Rolling StoneK. Austin CollinsOct 31, 2022
With a single shot, Descendant ceases to be a story about the recovery of a ship. It rapidly morphs into something broader: a story about the land. Who owned it back in the 1800s, who owns it now, and what all of this means for everyone else. Read full review
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