“Danger: High Voltage” are among the first words seen on screen in writer-director Clement Virgo’s adaptation of David Chariandy’s 2017 novel. It begins with wannabe DJ/producer Francis (Aaron Pierre) pressuring his younger sibling Michael (Lamar Johnson) to join him in scaling a sinisterly buzzing pylon in their home town of Scarborough, Ontario. The voltage stays at that level throughout much of Brother, which ticks off several films’ worth of heavy-duty subjects – police brutality, racism, the immigrant experience, gang violence, closeted desire, dementia, cancer – and only occasionally verges on the ponderous.
The question that haunts the film is: what made Francis climb that day? After the opening scene, the action shifts forward a decade to find Michael, his old flame Aisha (Kiana Madeira) and his mentally fragile mother Ruth (Marsha Stephanie Blake) still reeling from Francis’s death. In dealing with the tensions and pressures of Black masculinity, and slipping between three separate time periods in the life of its fatherless protagonist, the movie inevitably invites comparison with Moonlight. Memories of that Oscar-winner are also summoned by Todor Kobakov’s dolorous score and Guy Godfree’s cinematography, which is so sumptuously lit that it almost stains the eyes. Heavy with grief the film may be, but it’s always a beautiful mourning.
