Josephine has arrived at TIFF carrying the kind of momentum festivals rarely hand out twice. Director Beth de Araújo's drama already picked up Sundance's narrative Grand Jury Prize and its audience award earlier this year, and the Toronto screening is being treated as the start of a proper awards push, according to a review from JoBlo published Friday.

The film follows an eight-year-old girl, played by newcomer Mason Reeves, who runs ahead of her father during a Sunday morning jog through Golden Gate Park and stumbles onto a rape in progress. De Araújo shoots the assault from the child's point of view, and the camera does not look away. What follows is less about the crime itself than what it does to a kid who doesn't fully understand what she's watched.

That's where the film gets uncomfortable in ways festival reviews keep circling back to. Josephine starts spitting at people, apparently copying something she saw her father do after he and the police caught the man responsible. In one scene the review describes, she punches her pregnant mother in the stomach. The man who committed the assault, played by Phillip Ettinger, turns into something closer to a recurring presence in her head than a courtroom figure.

The custody of the case itself becomes the second half of the story. The victim, Josephine's mother, refuses to testify, according to the JoBlo review, which leaves the eight-year-old as the only witness willing to go through with it. The courtroom cross-examination scene is singled out as brutal, a sequence built around how badly the system is set up to handle a child on the stand.

Channing Tatum plays the father, guilt-ridden over not reaching his daughter in time, and the review calls it one of his better performances, a man trying to hold a marriage together while dealing with his own version of the trauma. Gemma Chan plays the mother, herself a survivor of assault, and the two disagree through the film over whether their daughter should be made to testify at all.

The review isn't uncritical. It flags Josephine as clinical almost to a fault, a film so committed to sitting in its subject matter that it barely allows a scene of warmth once the assault happens. The comparison drawn is to Die My Love, another title this festival season that's been called an endurance test as much as a movie. But the review still lands on calling it a necessary watch, one built to make audiences sit with why sexual assault cases so rarely make it to conviction, and why the sentences that follow are often light.

No India release date has surfaced yet, and with Sundance wins already banked, a wider festival run and distributor deal look like the next things to watch for before Josephine reaches audiences outside the circuit.