The Dutchman

The Architecture of a Trap

There is a terrifying moment in Andre Gaines’ *The Dutchman* where the boundaries between performance and reality dissolve, leaving us with the distinct, sinking feeling that we are watching a man drowning in a script he did not write. Adapting Amiri Baraka’s seminal 1964 play—a blistering, one-act confrontation on a New York subway—is a task that requires navigating a minefield of historical trauma. Gaines, making his narrative feature debut after a career in documentary, does not merely adapt the text; he encases it in a meta-fictional glass box, asking us to observe the tragedy of repetition.



The film’s visual language is suffocatingly precise, trading the gritty realism one might expect for a heightened, almost operatic noir. The subway car is no longer just public transit; it is a purgatory of steel and fluorescent light. Gaines utilizes the camera to entrap Clay (an exquisitely tortured André Holland), framing him in tight close-ups that emphasize his composure—the "buttoned-down" armor of the successful Black businessman. This visual rigidity stands in stark contrast to the chaotic intrusion of Lula (Kate Mara), who enters the frame not as a person, but as a disruptive force, an agent of entropy designed to dismantle Clay's carefully constructed identity.

Where the original play relied on the immediacy of the stage, the film expands the world outward, perhaps to a fault, but always with fascinating intent. We are introduced to Clay’s crumbling marriage with Kaya (Zazie Beetz) and his sessions with a therapist, Dr. Amiri (Stephen McKinley Henderson). This expansion is not mere padding; it recontextualizes the subway encounter as a manifestation of Clay's internal fracture. When Dr. Amiri hands Clay a copy of the play *Dutchman* within the film itself, Gaines suggests that the "narrative" of racial conflict in America is a pre-written destiny—a cursed object that Clay is doomed to inherit.



The heart of the film beats in the friction between Holland and Mara. Holland is a master of micro-expression; he shows us the immense physical toll of "code-switching," of maintaining a veneer of safety in a world that views him as a threat. His Clay is a man trying to rationalize the irrational. Mara, conversely, plays Lula with a predatory, shape-shifting energy. She is less a realistic character and more a demon of the collective unconscious—the manifestation of white fascination and repulsion. Their subway dance is uncomfortable, erotically charged, and deeply violent, not because of physical blows, but because of the psychological flaying taking place.



If the film stumbles, it is perhaps in its intellectual density; the meta-layers occasionally threaten to suffocate the raw, primal scream that Baraka’s original text demands. Yet, this "suffocation" feels intentional. The film argues that in 2026, the tragedy is no longer just the violence itself, but the knowledge of its inevitability. We know how this ends. Clay knows how this ends. And yet, the train keeps moving. *The Dutchman* is a challenging, jagged piece of cinema that refuses to offer catharsis, leaving us instead with the haunting image of a man realizing that the exit doors were never going to open.