CODA is an acronym for Children of Deaf Adults, and in this case that label applies to Ruby—played to perfection by Emilia Jones—who is the only hearing member of her immediate family. She’s also a gifted singer, to the surprise of everyone including herself, and although the trailer would lead you to believe that the movie’s major source of conflict is her family’s failure to understand her desire to join the school choir and even audition for a scholarship to the Berklee College of Music, that’s far from the whole story. 

A far bigger problem—and one largely glossed over by the film’s marketing—is that Ruby and her family are working poor, and their attempts to scrape together a meager living are hampered by everything from climate change to bureaucracy to neoliberal regulatory forces. CODA is, in short, one of the most subtle and compelling anti-capitalist films in ages but I wouldn’t be surprised if many viewers miss that fact, as well as the irony of its being distributed entirely by Apple. 

That it manages to explore this territory without being overtly political is a neat trick. But by far CODA‘s niftiest sleight-of-hand is that it deals with issues of disability without devolving into inspiration porn of the sort the trailer sells it as. Deafness is certainly a characteristic of three of its four main characters but it’s not a defining one. 

The film is irreverent without going for cheap shocks, adorable without being cloying, sentimental without being schmaltzy, awkward without being affected, and fits firmly into the tradition of feel-good cinema without being overly manipulative emotionally. My only criticism is that it plays it safe in terms of broader story structure. Let’s call it what it is—the Hero’s Journey. And as a result, by the end of the first act you’ll probably have an accurate sense of how it ends. 

But given how specific its scenario is—lower-class fishing family, three-quarters of whom are deaf, fight a constant battle to find balance between the desires of the individual and the needs of the collective—the tried-and-true narrative template serves mostly to add a much-needed dose of universal relatability. And in that sense, it very much succeeds. I’d be shocked if you can’t find some common ground with these characters, no matter your station. 

CODA is a remake of a French film called La Famille Bélier, which I’ll admit I wasn’t aware existed until I saw it listed in the closing credits. That does make some sense of a few things—notably the fact that American filmmakers rarely know what to do with class struggles, if they even bother to grapple with them. Whether La Famille Bélier is a better film, I can’t say. But CODA stands on its own as a very good one. 

The Apple TV+ presentation is a lovely thing to behold. Shot on location in Gloucester, Massachusetts, it certainly looks like no soundstages were employed. The Rossi family cottage has the sort of grit and clutter that reads as authentic whether it is or not, and it gives the entire picture a ton of texture and a warm cast overall. 

Even before we get our first peek at the home, though, the image is packed with the sort of chaos that makes me somewhat nervous when viewing at streaming bitrates. That never ends up being a problem, though—a least not when watched on Roku Ultra. The opening shot is of a rickety trawler bouncing around on choppy seas, with a flat sky above that’s broken up only by a few clouds on the horizon. 

This is stress-test material for any video codec, even one as good as HEVC. But amidst the chaos of the waves and the nearly imperceptible gradations of the sky, I never saw any of the misplaced textures or banding you’d have to keep an eye out for even on UHD Blu-ray. The only perceptible flaws in the image are a couple instances of unnecessary edge-enhancement you might not even spot depending on when you blink. 

While the picture doesn’t live or die based on razor sharpness, you can definitely see the benefits of the 6K shooting resolution and the 4K DI. Apple presents the film in Dolby Vision, and while you won’t notice many scenes with high overall brightness, the pinpoint bursts of specular intensity—especially on the seas—give the image a nice amount of pop. There’s also a lot of breathing room at the lower end of the value scale, which really helps with dimly lit interiors.

Apple delivers the film with a Dolby Atmos mix (AC-4, if your hardware supports that codec; Dolby Digital+, if not) that serves the material well. There’s one scene early on where the overhead effects were slightly gimmicky for about two or three seconds, but other than that it’s a nicely immersive mix that seems more concerned with accurately portraying interior and exterior spaces than with stressing your amps or subs. The school music room in which so much of Ruby’s story unfolds, for example, has its own sonic fingerprint, with exactly the sort of modes and other resonances you would expect of such a space, along with the consequent vocal colorations. The mix avoids the mistake of switching over to dry studio vocals during music numbers, and as such it all just sounds that much more authentic. 

In the end, it’s little authenticities of that sort that make CODA such an enjoyable film, despite the predictability of its larger structure. Yes, from a bird’s-eye view you’ll know how this one ends as soon as you settle into it, but there are oodles of little moment-to-moment surprises that make it a journey very much worth taking anyway.