Hall’s debut has the “strange mesmerism of an old photograph come to life” it is “at once a story of race in America, and something still more universal”. Both leads are superb: Negga is “impish but mournful”, while Thompson conveys the sense of a woman “hemmed in by race, gender”, everything. The film, available on Netflix, is beautifully shot in monochrome, which may sound a cliché, but in fact works “terrifically well” after all, black and white is mostly shades of grey.Īctors-turned-directors often make space for performances to shine, said Danny Leigh in the FT, and Hall is no exception. Both are passing as white, but while it is rare for Irene to wish to do so, for Clare it is routine: her Caucasian husband (Alexander Skarsgård) is “chillingly racist” and has no inkling of her heritage. Two well- to-do, light-skinned black women, Irene (Tessa Thompson) and Clare (Ruth Negga), who were friends at school, bump into each other again years later, in an elegant whites-only hotel in New York. The subject of passing is at the core of her “riveting” directorial debut, an adaptation of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novella. Only later in life did the actress – whose father was the theatre director Peter Hall – discover that her maternal grandfather had been biracial, but that he had passed as white. As a child, Rebecca Hall sometimes wondered if her mother, the American opera singer Maria Ewing, was black, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator, but it wasn’t discussed, so she never asked.