Forget It’s What’s Inside, the buzzy horror-thriller purchased by Netflix for $17 million earlier this week. Power—a documentary about U.S. policing, also expected on Netflix later this year— is the most frightening film that premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. Indeed, it’s perhaps the most frightening film you’ll watch all year.
As a history lesson, it’s a clear, comprehensive timeline of how policing in this country came to be. But, more urgently, the film functions as a warning: a dire plea for American citizens to realize that, with every increased police budget and new officer on the street, we are one step closer to living under an authoritarian regime. As one interview subject puts it: any cop can, at any time, “pull out a gun and shoot you in the chest.” It’s legal. And there’s very little we can do about it.
Power is director Yance Ford’s follow-up to his 2017 Oscar-nominated documentary, Strong Island, an intensely personal investigation of his own brother’s murder when Ford was 19 years old. This time, Ford takes a step back, staying strictly behind the camera, save for his dreamlike voiceover that narrates the film. Before the start of the film, Ford asks his audience for “curiosity, or, at least, suspicion” for what they are about to watch—an acknowledgment of the highly political, controversial, and partisan nature of the issue of policing. But it’s hard to imagine anyone who actually watches the film will be able to poke holes in Ford’s meticulous-researched, carefully-built, airtight argument: Police power in the U.S. was born out of racism and classism, and it’s spiraled completely out of control.
Ford assembles a team of diverse experts for talking head interviews, including prestigious university professors, Pulitzer Prize-winning authors, a Black Minneapolis police inspector, and victims of police harassment. Ford lets the academics walk audiences through the murky origins of U.S. policing. The story they tell draws a clear line from the capture of escaped slaves, the displacement of indigenous people, and the containment of labor strikes—all of which came before the first publicly-funded police force in Boston in 1838—to modern-day policing. From there, Ford delves into the history of overseas military colonialism. That includes a crash course on August Vollmer, the first police chief of Berkley, California, who brought “counterinsurgency” techniques that he learned as a military officer in the Philippines back to the U.S., as a way to control his own citizens. In this way, the film argues, police began to treat the American public the same way the U.S. military treats its perceived foreign enemies.
For the section on the civil rights movement and resistance to police violence, Ford employs a wealth of fantastic archival footage, including clips of Black Panther founder Huey P. Newton and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader Stokely Carmichael. It’s an overview, not a deep dive, but the clips Ford employs are effective in backing his film’s thesis. A montage of U.S. presidents responding to this with more and more (and more and more and more) money to police is equally chilling. But Power truly finds its footing in the final third of the film, when the history lesson finally catches up to the state of modern-day policing. One former New York City resident, Nilesh, offers a heartbreaking testimony of the mental toll of the city’s “stop and frisk” policy had on him, being stopped by cops on the regular: “I felt like I was some terrible criminal. I felt like I some hoodrat, f–king, crack-slinging piece of s–t. I’ve never done any of those things.”
Ford has no shortage of horrifying footage of modern-day police brutality to demonstrate his point. It all culminates in the infamous footage of George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, when police officers choked Floyd to death by kneeling on his neck and back for 9 minutes and 29 seconds, sparking an uproar across the nation. Ford censors the footage in such a way that you don’t see Floyd as he dies on screen. But you do see, and hear, the civilians begging officers to stop, to check his pulse, to get him help. “I’ve put it in the blind spot,” Ford says in a voiceover, referring to the censored violence. “But how much can the blind spot hold?”
Near the end of the film, Ford finally allows himself to be heard, though not seen, interviewing one of his subjects. The point of the moment is to sit with the overwhelming scariness that all of this violence, all of this control, all of this power that U.S. police forces have is, for the most part, perfectly legal. The biggest threat to democracy—to freedom—one interviewee argues, isn’t Donald Trump, or Joe Biden, or Hillary Clinton, any other politician. It’s the police.
Power has been acquired by Netflix, and is expected on the streaming service later this year.