Akilla’s Escape: An interview with star and composer Saul Williams

By Matthew McMillan 22 August 2022

Akilla’s Escape, the latest feature from Jamaican Canadian writer-director, Charles Officer, is a crime thriller that upends genre expectations. The trend set by Ritchie and co in recent decades that subscribes to kinetic pacing, the subordination of character study to the promotion of flippant, low-stakes gunfights, and a general cockiness of tone amount to the antithesis of what Akilla’s Escape has to offer. The familiar setup of a routine collection of illicit funds gone wrong is propelled into far more contemplative territory by Officer’s measured pacing and thematic considerations of generational abuse, poverty and redemption.

At the centre of this simultaneously existential and political tale is Saul Williams, who animates the titular Akilla with a reflective poise, starkly contrasting with the detached cool of someone like Daniel Craig’s XXXX of Layer Cake, or the bombastic psychopathy of screen gangsters in the Scarface mould. Williams does a fantastic job of grounding the themes Officer is exploring in Akilla’s taciturn disposition and anchoring the generation-spanning study of systematic and internalised deprivation.

The Upcoming had the pleasure of speaking to Williams about his performance and the film’s evocative score, which he developed in collaboration with Robert Del Naja of Massive Attack, as well as his broader thoughts on how society can overcome the systemic problems touched upon in Akilla’s Escape.