After his wife dies, a struggling father takes his son with Down syndrome on a hard road trip to his first baseball game.
It’s the journey, not the destination.
Few films embody that saying as beautifully and sincerely as Color Book – a simple road trip between a father and his son, yet every mile travelled becomes less about reaching a place and more about learning how to cope with life, grief, responsibility, and each other.
Writer/director David Fortune, making his feature directorial and screenwriting debut, demonstrates remarkable confidence. Together with director of photography Nikolaus Summerer and editor Oriana Soddu, he crafts a drama that captivates through its honesty rather than dramatic spectacle. Summerer’s beautiful black-and-white cinematography strips the world of distraction, while Soddu’s measured editing allows every obstacle, pause, and emotional beat to breathe naturally.
As you watch the film, pay attention to the relationship between the title and the absence of colour onscreen. The Color Book is far more than a title. It becomes a subtle metaphor. In a world photographed without colour, the characters are, in many ways, searching for it themselves. Hope, healing, connection, joy – those are the colours they gradually attempt to rediscover. It is a beautiful cinematic choice that extends well beyond aesthetics.
Fortune also deserves enormous credit for refusing to overdramatise material that is already emotionally painful. Rather than manipulating the audience into tears, he invites us to accompany these characters as invisible observers. We may not enjoy every step of their journey, but we inevitably learn from it. More importantly, we find ourselves reassessing parts of our own lives along the way.
William Catlett delivers a deeply affecting performance as a father desperately trying to keep everything together, fully aware that even the smallest mistake could cause his carefully balanced world to implode – or explode. And then there is Jeremiah Alexander Daniels, who steals the show. His composed and wonderfully natural performance becomes the emotional heartbeat of the story. Sometimes saying very little communicates far more than pages of dialogue ever could, and Daniels does an incredible job of doing exactly that.
Despite Netflix’s understandable appetite for large-scale Hollywood productions, every now and then it surprises us with projects that justify its position at the top of the streaming world.
Color Book is one of those surprises. A film with an enormous heart in the right place.
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