I don’t often have a visceral reaction to a movie. Usually I laugh, I’m bored, I’m intrigued. It’s not often, however, that I feel the need to flee a theater because of what’s on the screen. Darin grabbed my hand and whispered, “It’ll be okay, really.”

Tsotsi was a difficult movie for me to take, because a lot of the movie is about a baby in danger. I’m going to go ahead and spoil something for anyone who might go see this movie and might have the same reaction I did:

The baby turns out okay.

Tsotsi is a South African movie about the titular character, a baby-faced criminal who doesn’t even have a real name (“Tsotsi” means “Thug”). He and his band of cronies go out and night and do crimes in the glittering modern city of Johannesburg, with Tsotsi picking their victims, and then they escape to the run-down ghetto of the township on the outskirts of town, where everyone lives in concrete buildings topped with tin roofs. One night his compatriot Butcher kills their victim, primarily for the fun of it, and in the ensuing blame game Tsotsi beats up another member of their gang, Teacher Boy. Upset about what he’s done, Tsotsi runs out into the night, across the field, ending up at a posh upscale community. A woman in a BMW gets out of her car to fiddle with the automatic gate opener and Tsotsi jumps into her car. When she yells at him to stop, he shoots her, then drives off.

Only when he’s miles away does he discover that there’s an infant in the back seat.

What happens as a result — to Tsotsi, to the infant, to the woman he’s shot, to her husband, to his friends — is not “big” in the way it would be in a Hollywood movie. Tsotsi does not automatically morph into a nice guy — he has no idea how to be a nice guy. He doesn’t even automatically become a good caregiver, having had no care himself, raising himself from an early age. But things do change for him: his perceptions of himself, of other people, his relationships to his friends.

One of the most interesting things about Tsotsi is how there are so many factors in the story that are simply there: never called out, never given as excuses. Several times during the story we see giant billboards (they must be all over Johannesburg) alerting people to the dangers of HIV/AIDS. The destruction AIDS has wreaked on South Africa looms over both Tsotsi personally and larger segments of the society — the scene at the children’s camp is devastating. The divide between the poverty of Tsotsi’s township and the upscale elegance of the people he robs is gigantic — they might as well be on different planets. The BMW Tsotsi abandons is stripped bare by the time the cops find it. The only hope Tsotsi finds is this little baby. What it gives him the hope to do is strange.

Darin really liked this movie. I had a much more difficult time watching it. It’s definitely a welcome change from standard Hollywood fare, though — so many times we’ve walked out of movies and within seconds we can barely remember a damn thing about it (one reason I didn’t write up anything about The Matador, amongst other movies that I’ve completely forgotten). I can see why Tsotsi won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film — it’s not an easy story, by any means. But if you’re looking for something a little stronger and more resonant, this is probably a good choice.