Tribeca 2021: Catch the Fair One Review

This will be one of several reviews from this year’s Tribeca film Festival. To follow our coverage, click here.

Catch the Fair One centers around Kaylee (Kali Reis), a boxer from an indigenous community, whose younger sister has been lost to human trafficking. From this, she makes a life-altering decision to infiltrate its underground network in hopes of rescuing her. Her motivation is not just one of desperation, but rather, anger, as she is furious over the powerlessness of what lead to her sister being taken, and the inability to discover any answers about her family’s loss. But ultimately, at the root of each of her emotions is a simple belief –

Survival.

This is a shared mantra of Kaylee’s community of which the film shows just a small level of oppression that is endured regularly on a much wider scale. This enslavement largely goes unnoticed because society-at-large does not see the value in caring and serves as the catalyst for her journey further down into her society’s darkest places in order to find truth and attempt to break the cycle. Her descent into this madness is something that Catch the Fair One does exceptionally well as it is a slow-burning journey that appears straightforward and simple but is completely upended in its second act leading to an incredibly twisted and terrifying finale.

From its cast, cinematography, and tightly wound script, Catch the Fair One excels in almost every way. Reis is phenomenal as Kaylee, expressing both fear and satisfaction with relative ease as she ventures further and further away from who she is and begins to embrace a character that is necessary to achieve the answers she desires but will come at a personal and emotional cost. The script delivers an uncomplicated journey for answers but within its sparse dialogue and reliance on raw emotion, it manages to create a simmering level of tension that is so thick it can almost be touched and never allows the viewer time to catch their breath up until its final moments.

In the end, Catch the Fair One is a fantastic film that takes a joyless and commonplace story of subjugation and thrusts the intent of retribution into its narrative. Its thrilling story captures the viewer from the very beginning and slowly begins to tighten its grip until it’s too late. It is a must-see that will leave its audience questioning where their internal line of morality would be.

still courtesy of Tribeca

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