In the early stages of a loving and committed interracial relationship, the strength of Renesha (Brittany S. Hall) and Evan's (Will Brill) bond is tested by the gender and racial prejudices she encounters as a Black woman seeking justice within the healthcare industry and criminal justice system.... (Full plot summary below)
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In the early stages of a loving and committed interracial relationship, the strength of Renesha (Brittany S. Hall) and Evan's (Will Brill) bond is tested by the gender and racial prejudices she encounters as a Black woman seeking justice within the healthcare industry and criminal justice system.
Leave your thoughts about Test Pattern.
| The Hollywood ReporterJourdain SearlesThe film is a staggeringly impressive debut, blending color, sound and story to create an intricate emotional tapestry. |
| RogerEbert.comMonica CastilloCoupled with the talents of cinematographer Ludovica Isidori and music by Rob Rusli, Ford’s Test Pattern is an engrossing human drama, one that examines the intersections and inequalities between race, gender, and healthcare in a poignant and powerful way. |
| Austin ChronicleSelome HailuFord’s commitment to implying trauma instead of visualizing it is more than just an impressive formal constraint. Test Pattern proves the fault of more uncreative depictions of racial and gendered violence that exploit bare bodies and blood for shock value rather than depth and specificity. |
| Rolling StoneK. Austin CollinsTest Pattern, for its emphatically binary sense of the world as summed up in the differences between these two people, for its literal examinations of blackness and whiteness, and gender, and everything else, somehow avoids falling into the trap of painting the world in black and white. It is a film that — more than presenting the mess of the life — dives in headlong, wisely, cuttingly, and to devastating effect. |
| The New York TimesDevika GirishTest Pattern achieves a lot with very little: The film’s nonlinear editing and cannily scored silences invite our interpretations, locating in them the entanglements of race and gender. Ford pushes us, if not to definitive answers, then to the right questions. |
| Los Angeles TimesCarlos AguilarA trenchant conversation piece from a promising new director, Test Pattern provides ample room for one’s biases and privilege to shape our interpretation of what’s on screen. |
| Movie NationRoger MooreFord has made a downbeat, realistic treatment of this subject that doesn’t have a built-in call-to-arms as part of its make-up. That’s implied. Nobody, no couples, should have to go through this. |
| Slant MagazineWilliam RepassThe film strikingly punctuates the detachment of realist drama with the expressionism of psychological horror. |
| LarsenOnFilmJosh LarsenIf Test Pattern feels a bit unfinished by its end, it’s not because I wanted resolution—documenting the refusal of resolution seems to be the point—but because there seemed to still be more, especially between the main couple, to explore. |
| The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Sarah-Tai BlackA deceptively simple and concise narrative structure allows Ford to parse her subject and characters with a graceful internal complexity that shows rather than tells. |
