“The Blackening” is a slasher movie that is also a funny, botched social satire. That the satire turns out to be sharper than the scares isn't a problem, it's all part of the sloppy, demonic party atmosphere of the film. The staging, which feels like a sequel to "Friday the 13th" via "Bodies Bodies Bodies," brings together nine old college friends to celebrate the weekend of June 19th in a big, spacious house they've rented. near the forest.
As Tina Turner's version of "I Can't Stand the Rain" spins on the record player, the first two to arrive, Morgan (Yvonne Orji) and Shawn (Jay Pharaoh), head to the basement game room, which It has shelves of old board games, an old TV, a Ouija board, and a featured game called The Blackening. Removing the lid of the box, they discover, to their horror, that there is a plastic Sambo head in the middle of the board, asking questions like "Who is the first black character to survive a horror movie?" For a few minutes, we are in the field of "Scream" by way of "Get Out".
Director: Tim Story
Writers: Tracy Oliver, Dewayne Perkins
Stars: Antoinette Robertson, Dewayne Perkins, Sinqua Walls
As the others arrive, they go downstairs to the game room and suddenly the TV comes on. We see one of those old screens of this is an emergency broadcast system test with another face of Sambo in the middle, while "Camptown Races" plays on the banjo, and then the TV picture changes. to a black and white video of what happened to Morgan and Shawn. It's not a pretty picture. For a moment, it seems like we're in the realm of "Saw," but as soon as we see the killer, hidden behind a bondage mask attached to a grotesque caricature of blackface, the mood of hostility and racist anxiety begins to evoke, more than ever, a certain sunken place.
"Get Out" was a great horror movie and, in its own way, a serious one that echoed the deep paranoia of movies like "Rosemary's Baby." “The Blackening” makes no such claims. The script, co-written by Tracy Oliver ("Girls Trip") and Dewayne Perkins (who plays the wide-eyed, talkative, gay DeWayne), is packed with dialogue that comes through with a comedic self-awareness.
“The Blackening” is framed as a thriller, but the way veteran director Tim Story (“Barbershop,” “Think Like a Man”) has staged it, the entire film turns out to be a riff, a witty and wicked. one: about black inside jokes, the referentiality of black pop culture, and blackness itself. This is the kind of movie that revolves around the inner complexities of the Spades card game, and in which a character looks at Nnamdi (Sinqua Walls), the tall, handsome player of the group, and says, “You're an original African. . You are a Black that is still in its original packaging. Or the ranger appears and they greet him with the phrase: "I have never been so happy to see a white savior."
It's about funny, nasty stuff, all presented in the spirit of the characters revealing themselves, the movie implies, in a way they wouldn't if white people were around. The actors make their presence felt, from Melvin Gregg as King, the arrogant ex-gangsta who feels he is doing penance for marrying a white woman, to Antoinette Robinson and Grace Byers as Lisa and Allison, who hold conversations so rooted in intensity from his black brotherhood who are telepathic, to Jermaine Fowler as Clifton, the nerd of the group, who with his crooked gaze and fixation on the superiority of the android to the iPhone at first he seems like a harmless geek to us, but he turns out to be a geek from hell.
There is a surprising resonance to Fowler's interpretation. This is a film that culminates with the murderer asking the members of the group to save themselves by sacrificing the one he is "the blackest". But what does that mean? As our definitions of clichés begin to fade, we realize that the very notion of being "the blackest" is a self-defeating power trip.
The excellent advertising tagline for "The Blackening" ("We can't all die first") is, of course, a reference to a longstanding trope and striking complaint: that the black character in a horror movie always dies first. . But the real joke is how a perception like that has become part of popular culture. The Blackening game continues to test the trivia knowledge of the characters, with brain teasers such as: Name the five black actors who appeared in "Friends." By the time they're trying to answer that, the movie is making us laugh out loud at the bitter irony of it all: that while a renegade pop scholasticism unites these characters it surely does so with horror movie geeks. "Scream".
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