Review of CODA (2021) by Claytaylor21 — 01 Jan 2022

Coda is a simple yet beautiful film about a family of deaf people with one daughter who doesn't share their condition.. This daughter, Ruby, is blessed with a beautiful singing voice that her family can't appreciate.

The highlight of the film is the emotional chords it strikes in the third act. I constantly cried for the last thirty minutes because of the powerful screenplay and the perfect performances that demonstrated familial love perfectly.

Emilia Jones and Troy Kotsur were the two standouts and both are deserving of award nominations for their tremendous turns. The movie is also extremely funny with the writers leveraging the story's concept to create a lot of laugh out loud moments in the film's first act.

My only real problems with CODA are that it has an extremely predictable plot and one character whose inclusion felt unnecessary in Ruby's boyfriend Miles. Fortunately, these problems don't take anything away from the strong emotional beats, so this film made an extremely strong impact on me and will have me thinking about it for days to come.