Nickel Boys’ storytelling technique is radical for a movie — but common in games

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Nickel Boys is one of the hot tickets of movies’ awards season this year. The first fiction feature film by artist, photographer, and documentarian RaMell Ross was adapted from a Pulitzer Prize-winning Colson Whitehead novel about an abusive, segregationist reform school in Florida, based on the historic Dozier School. The story jumps back and forth in time between the 1960s, as two young Black men are incarcerated at the Nickel Academy, and the 2010s, as law enforcement is investigating the school — and digging up the bodies of those who died there.

The focus on trauma, history, and racial oppression makes Nickel Boys sound like typical, worthy prestige-movie fare, but that’s not quite what this movie is. Think of it more as this year’s The Zone of Interest — a technically innovative, artistically daring literary adaptation that finds a bracing new perspective on some challenging material. Most cinephiles haven’t seen anything quite like it before. Gamers may feel differently.

Nickel Boys is composed almost entirely of first-person point-of-view shots. It isn’t the first movie to attempt this style: Robert Montgomery tried it all the way back in 1947 in his film noir Lady in the Lake, and there are a few scattered examples, like Gaspar Noé’s trippy 2009 art film Enter the Void, the 2016 action movie Hardcore Henry, and a sequence in 2005’s Doom. Soon, we’ll get to see Steven Soderbergh’s Presence, a haunted-house movie shot entirely from the ghost’s perspective. But it’s fair to say that first-person camera, as a sustained film narrative technique, is very rare, and not always successful.

In that context, what Ross has achieved with Nickel Boys is truly remarkable — especially since it’s not an immersive action or horror movie, but a complex, thoughtful drama, with the perspective shifting between two main characters. Film critics are rightly hailing it as visionary. But the odd thing to consider is that in the adjacent medium of video games, Nickel Boys’ storytelling mode is not radical at all; in fact, it’s commonplace.

Pretty much as soon as video game developers could place a virtual camera in a 3D space, they were making first-person games, like 1992’s Wolfenstein 3D. In fact, some were doing it well before that; before 3D engines were fast enough to adopt the player’s perspective, developers faked it by flicking through galleries of static first-person shots in role-playing games like 1985’s The Bard’s Tale. For almost as long as video games have existed, players have wanted to look through their characters’ eyes and inhabit their worlds.

It might not be fair to compare the immersive, action-fueled urgency of Doom or Call of Duty with what Ross is attempting in Nickel Boys. The film is less about immersing viewers in the experiences of Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson) than it is about generating a radical kind of empathy with them, and using the first-person camera to challenge and complicate notions of identity. But there are plenty of examples of video games doing this, too.

Through the 1990s and 2000s, the first-person camera was mostly the preserve of intense action games, especially shooters. But in the 2010s, indie developers started using it as a subjective, empathetic vehicle for character-based storytelling in games that were given the (initially) derisory tag “walking simulators.” In games like The Chinese Room’s Dear Esther, Fullbright’s Gone Home, Campo Santo’s Firewatch, and Giant Sparrow’s What Remains of Edith Finch, first person is combined with realist settings and magical-realist flourishes to put the player inside a different psychological reality, exploring family histories, personal tragedies, and landscapes of memory. That’s not so different from what Ross is trying to achieve in Nickel Boys.

That’s not to say that Ross is cribbing his best moves from video games. (In fact, he says he never plays games.) Nor does it prevent game designers from learning from Ross’ techniques. The movie’s editing, in particular, is powerfully effective in the way it plays the two protagonists’ perspectives against each other, splices them together, or lines them up for some stunning moments of convergence. (For partly technical reasons, editing is seldom used to great effect in video games, although there are some good examples, like the jump-cuts of Brendon Chung’s Thirty Flights of Loving.)

Occasionally, Ross breaks out of first person to take a third-person view, framed tightly behind a character’s shoulders, to brilliantly destabilizing effect. Nickel Boys contains a handful of shots — like the poster shot of the two boys looking up into a ceiling mirror together — that are breathtaking in both their technical artistry and their emotional intent.

There’s a level of sophistication and playfulness to the way Ross sets up the movie’s first-person form and then intentionally breaks it that you rarely see in games. But still, the subjective, enveloping storytelling Nickel Boys taps into is one most gamers will be deeply familiar with. The film audiences that are currently finding it so arresting would be well advised to dip into some of gaming’s first-person greats.

Nickel Boys opens in limited release on Dec. 13 and will expand to wide release on Jan. 3, 2025.