Jessica Kiang Eighty-two minutes is not a long time. And yet Shatara Michelle Ford’s intelligent and engrossing feature debut packs an enormous amount in, while still finding room to let characters, moments and difficult, provocative issues breathe.
An ostensibly small-scale drama that traces a couple of days in the aftermath of a sexual assault, it’s a remarkable display of compression and control, using one interracial relationship as a microcosm in which to observe the invisible influence of enormous, malign societal forces. “Test Pattern” — tiny, sedate yet urgent — is like the tinkling of a warning bell that somehow signals the five-alarm fire of ingrained racism, sexism and the faulty American medical and judicial systems, that rages.
Read more on variety.com