The Citizen

I immigrated with my family during the last days of the Kadar era to the USA. My uncle was already living in Philly so it made greencards and citizenship easier.

We were very lucky: As climate change and inequality course through the world, the number of refugees will climb to unimaginable heights. Americans will seek refuge in their own country as parts of the USA will become uninhabitable.

So the citizen is a timely movie about many things- isolation, loneliness, being a cultural outcast, the immigration process and much else- and I wish I liked it more. But its sledgehammer style story telling and eat your spinach messaging where every thought is excruciatingly, explicitly conveyed to the viewer without subtlety, leaves much to be desired. It's a shame because the cast is mostly great, tho sometimes reduced to stock characters (the official, the racist son, the noble migrants) denied their complexity in service of a story that wants to but stops a hair shy of valorizing migrants and demonizing natives.