This critically feted and broodingly touching Canadian drama from writer-director Clement Virgo focuses on two siblings, Francis and Michael, brilliantly played by Aaron Pierre and Lamar Johnson. Yet despite the title and the poster that both foreground the two male leads, the film could equally have been called Mother (as opposed to mother!), with Marsha Stephanie Blake dominating the screen as the Jamaican-Canadian matriarch Ruth, struggling to hold and protect her sons. Indeed, all of Brother’s most powerfully affecting moments centre on Ruth’s love and loss, with her children the source of her joy and sadness.
We first meet Francis and Michael as teenagers at the foot of a gigantic power pylon, an electrical crackle buzzing in the bright rural air. The older, more adventurous Francis is encouraging his shy younger brother to climb this vertiginous structure. “Follow my every move,” he tells him, “think on every step,” assuring Michael that if he does so he will be safe. From here, the drama jumps forward 10 years, to the more washed-out environs of downtown Scarborough, Toronto, where Michael meets Aisha (Kiana Madeira) and takes her back to the apartment he still shares with his mother. A former sweetheart (flashbacks show Michael’s affections dating back 20 years), Aisha is dealing with recent bereavement, and has come back to the place she once called home. Francis is nowhere to be seen, although quite why is a mystery that the movie reveals only very gradually.
