In my review for BlacKkKlansman last year, I mentioned how one virtue of the feature was how it was clearly made without any thought of placating or sugar-coating things for white viewers, it was about the stark reality of how racism permeates American society to this very day. A similar quality informs Dee Rees' 2011 feature Pariah, though in this case, it's a movie clearly made explicitly for and from a queer perspective. Pariah is a film exploring the turmoil that ensues when a family isn't accepting of their child's sexuality and benefits mightily from not wasting time to assure heterosexual viewers that "not all heterosexual people are like that" or similar platitudes. That's not what Pariah is here for. Its focus is bringing specifically queer experiences to a cinematic format of storytelling and it does that marvelously.
