The Dutchman (2026) [Movie Review] — A play becomes a psychological mirror

Director Andre Gaines attempts a bold migration of Amiri Baraka’s incendiary stage piece into contemporary cinema (The Dutchman). The film follows Clay (André Holland), a man whose fragile marriage to Kaya (Zazie Beetz) is unravelling. After a therapy session with Dr. Amiri (Stephen McKinley Henderson), Clay steps onto an uptown train and finds the lines between his life and the play Dutchman collapsing. Kate Mara’s Lula (Kate Mara) is reimagined here as a predatory force whose intrusion propels Clay toward a night of public humiliation and violence. Aldis Hodge (Aldis Hodge) appears as a friend-politician whose fundraiser crystallizes the film’s central conflict.

Direction & Adaptation

Ambition without enough restraint

Gaines, known for his nonfiction portraits, wants to expand Baraka’s claustrophobic subway play into a larger urban fable. That expansion is both the film’s selling point and its problem. By moving scenes off the train and into apartments, streets, and a Harlem fundraiser, Gaines transforms a pressure-cooker allegory into a series of vignettes that never quite fuse. The movie often feels unsure whether it’s honoring Baraka’s provocation or modernizing it — an editor’s scalpel would have helped. Cinematically, the film oscillates between dreamlike overlays and straightforward realism; the tonal shifts are intriguing but undercut by uneven pacing.

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Performances

Strong actors, thin scaffolding

Holland anchors the film with a careful interiority; he conveys Clay’s exhaustion, shame, and small triumphs with subtlety. Beetz does admirable work with Kaya, but her character remains frustratingly schematic — the script rarely allows her inner life to rival Clay’s. Mara opts for caricature in a performance that reads as deliberate but ultimately blunt: Lula’s menace is undeniable, yet the choices reduce her to a single note. Henderson provides the film’s most interesting through-line as a quasi-mythic presence: his Dr. Amiri oscillates between mentor, playwright-figure, and enigmatic provocateur. Hodge’s cameo delivers needed texture, but the ensemble frequently struggles against a screenplay that favors idea over human nuance.

Themes & Shortcomings

Provocation without fresh purpose

The film returns to a mid-20th-century text with modern actors and a different cultural moment. That choice invites a meaningful conversation — when should classics be reworked and when should they be left as historical artifacts? Gaines gestures at this debate but rarely interrogates it. The adaptation’s biggest failure is its sidelining of Black women: Kaya is reactive, not generative, and the film’s emotional architecture depends almost entirely on Clay’s interior crisis. By widening the narrative world, Gaines exposes blind spots that the original play could mask in its immediacy. Comparisons to earlier attempts to screen Black literary classics — as with recent, polarizing adaptations like Native Son and the long shadow of Richard Wright’s original novel (writer Richard Wright) — are inevitable; here, the film struggles to justify its own existence beyond theatrical homage.

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Verdict

Worth seeing, but not entirely convincing

There’s much to admire: committed performances, striking moments of mise-en-scène, and an earnest attempt to reanimate a canonical text. Yet the film’s structural choices and its inattentiveness to female interiority make it feel like a provocative idea that never becomes a fully realized motion picture. For audiences curious about adaptations and the continuing life of mid-century Black drama, The Dutchman is an intriguing, imperfect work.

Rating: 5.5 / 10 — ambitious, occasionally powerful, but too often self-conscious and incomplete.