We like to think we know the people in our lives, especially those in our close-knit little nuclear families. But do we ever really know what someone is capable of? Who they are beneath it all? What they want and what they’re willing to do to get it? Whether they will threaten those on their bad side with fireworks? For most of us, the answer is probably yes, yes, yes, yes, and no but for Amy Edgar (Naomi Watts), it might not be so clear.

Luce is a puzzle box of a movie, one that reveals much about writer-director Julius Onah’s psyche. The film follows Luce (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), a star student, track captain, debate champion and all around model citizen. Successful and liberal parents Amy and Peter (Tim Roth) adopted Luce from a war-torn African somewhere at the ripe age of 10, changing his difficult-to-pronounce name into one that meant, fittingly, “light”. Pouring themselves into rehabilitating, Amy and Peter woo young renamed Luce with fairy tales of the American Dream. In line with the film’s secretive and withholding nature, we never learn Luce’s actual name.

Despite Luce’s accomplishments and high social standing, history teacher Harriet Wilson (Octavia Spencer) has her suspicions about the soon-to-be valedictorian, tipped to his “other side” by a disturbing perspective paper he wrote allegedly championing violent revolutionary action. Coupled with the discovery of fireworks in his locker, Wilson escalates the issue, involving Luce’s parents and unwittingly starting a potentially dangerous Cold War with the outwardly perfect student.

In a way, Luce feels like it could be an alternative timeline Onah has written for himself, even though it is adapted from a play by co-screenwriter JC Lee. The Girl Is in Trouble and Cloverfield Paradox director hails from war-devastated Nigeria but immigrated to the United States for high school and later earned a Dean’s Fellowship at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and was awarded the prestigious Jack Kent Cooke Foundation Scholarship. In addition to being an effectively pins-and-needles social thriller, Luce provides a thought-provoking exploration of privilege, race, and expectation with Onah grappling with his own past as a successful black immigrant earning accommodates in historically white institutions. The story is not one of the tradional African-American but the African-turned-American and the film grapples with the idea of how society thrusts its ugly history upon people of color and our expectations of them, good, bad or otherwise.

Onah drives a divisive contrast for his African-turned-American subject, one that is especially exacerbated by the confusion of teenager hormones. Luce feels that the world is intent on treating him only one of two ways – as a squeaky clean Obama-type role model or a secreted sociopath with dark intentions and a slick but false pleasant veneer. Luce succeeds by allowing Harrison to play both sides without really ever giving into the temptation to define the character by the lingering questions and doubts of his parents, peers, and teachers. As well as what we as audiences are inclinced to expect.

Smartly written, Luce doesn’t lend itself easily to definition. There are elements of domestic drama and psychological horror but the film never surrenders to putting itself in such an easy box. Even as a character study, Luce refuses to provide black and white answers and leaves audiences to wrestle with their own uneasy lingering prejudices. Is Luce a good or bad dude? The answer is likely more complicated than that but it’s also one that you will be forced to answer for yourself.

The excellent performances from Watts, Roth, and especially Spencer and Harrison allow Luce to build a sense of dread and sit in it like a pig in shit. As the pressure builds and builds and builds, the film’s restraint can work to its advantage and detriment, with the third act boiling over into a whole lot of whistling and signaling but very little in the way of pressure relief. So too is the climax subdued and even-keeled, delivered with the polite menace that haunts the film and its characters, and one that feels more suited to the stage than the screen.

Insofar as Luce is an expression about the danger of assumptions, Onah challenges white liberal wokeness and the meaning of true liberation. A confrontation between Luce and Ms. Wilson sees the probably ex-child-soldier, who confesses to learning how to handle a gun before he ever sat behind the wheel of a car, detail his favorite holiday: Independence Day. He gushes over the meaning and history of the cherished American celebration, complete with it’s violent annual display of firepower. With school shootings in America a daily lingering threat, Luce’s near-diabolical gushing about liberation and explosions drips with ominous and malevolent shade, made all the more disturbingly delicious by Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury’s throbbing score. Luce will likely never made good on his revolutionary philosophies but in doing so proves that sometimes a locked and loaded wit is just as dangerous as a loaded gun.

CONCLUSION: Julius Onah has crafted a strong social thriller that features considerable performances from Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, Octavia Spencer and Kelvin Harrison Jr. and, like its titular character, doesn’t easily conform to the expectations we might have for it.