Content Warning: This film contains depictions of police violence toward the Black community.

Robert-Jonathan Koeyers’s It’s Nice in Here is a gorgeously animated short film that makes an attempt at nuance but isn’t quite as effective as could have been. The first half of the film is a haunting and poignant reflection on loss, and the second half of the film makes an admirable attempt to capture the tragedy of police shootings and just how easy it is for officers who think they’re “good cops” to murder Black youth because of the racism that is baked into policing. However, to be truly effective, the film needed to show more of the socialization that embeds racism into policing and trains officers to murder members of the Black community. The most effective sequence in the film is the scene of the shooting, the way the animation shifts and changes as the narrative shifts between the different witnesses’ perspectives. The film’s switch to live-action at the end doesn’t quite work, and the political pundits who politicize the shooting is a little too on the nose. It’s an interesting attempt to show more nuance in a police murder, but it doesn’t fully work the way the filmmaker is intending it to.