Mark Reviews Movies: TOPSIDE

Topside, Vertical Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 24, 2022

A 5-year-old girl lives with her mother and a community of displaced people in the abandoned tunnels of the New York City subway system in Topside. The movie, written and directed by Logan George and Celine Held (both making their feature debuts), creates an atmosphere of dread, despair, and desperation, but it offers such little insight into these characters and this particular way of life that it mostly come across as an exercise in maintaining those feelings.

The girl is named Little (Zhalia Farmer), and her mother Nikki (played by Held in a fine performance) often leaves the girl alone in the subterranean realm, while she goes into the city to make money. For a while, the filmmakers aren't concerned with any form of plot, and instead, they establish a steady rhythm of Little's daily life through sudden edits from one random activity to the next.

The girl watches cartoons on a portable DVD player, goes searching through rubbish for anything neat, wanders the tunnels singing to herself, and spends time with her neighbors. One of those neighbors, named John (Fatlip), notices that Little hasn't learned as much as a child her age should, but Nikki ignores his stern advice to get the girl into a school. That would get in the way of Nikki's own life and could be too much of a risk. All of them could lose this place they have turned into a home, and Little could be taken away from Nikki if they're discovered.

The approach here juxtaposes Little's innocent perspective that all of this is normal with the obvious understanding that it isn't. It's not much, but the ways George and Held assemble these vignettes of the girl's everyday life and barely seen or heard threats to her routine mirror the character's sense of this world.

Matters become far more straightforward when some government officials arrive to clear out the tunnel, sending Nikki and Little to the streets. The sun outside and the fluorescent lights indoors are blinding to Little, who either has never seen or can't remember the world of the surface, and the cacophony of people and traffic is just as overwhelming. Farmer's performance is distressingly authentic, as Little can't adjust to this unknown place and is dragged along to who-knows-where by her mother.

The rest of the story, though, amounts to a series of scenes of underlying tension, as Nikki brings Little to a drug den and disappears, and fear, as the mother navigates the subway to find her misplaced daughter. Topside avoids judgment of these characters, but in transforming the observational and empathetic angle of the early part of its tale into a string of discomforting and dangerous situations, the movie also ignores anything deeper.

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