Here is a decent enough comedy horror that can’t quite get past an apparent identity crisis. The marketing suggests a variation on the Wayans brothers’ durable Scary Movie series, and, sure enough, the script does take similar swipes at the conventions of contemporary horror.
We begin with a couple playing a scary board game in a deserted cottage and being sucked into violent catastrophe. The Blackening looks back to Saw and anticipates this year’s Talk to Me. But the jokes are less broad than the Wayanses’. Indeed, elsewhere, the writers look to be leaning towards the denser racial commentary of Jordan Peele’s Get Out. It’s all a bit of a muddle, but an entertaining muddle that is not afraid to Scooby-Doo the heck out of its excellent cast.
Following that prologue, we join a group of young black people as they drive to the cabin for a celebration of Juneteenth, the US federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery. You can bet they will ignore your advice and go down the equivalent of the rickety stairs.
Experienced horror buffs may get ahead of the plot and wonder how, with the house full of only black characters, a satire (which the film sort of is) will address the most demeaning trope concerning people of colour in such entertainments. With great ingenuity, as it happens.
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The team find the same racist board game – a “minstrel” at its centre – and foolishly draw a card that notes black characters always get killed first in slasher movies. They must pick the blackest character among them and send him or her to a bloody death. What follows is, obviously, a conversation that only people of colour should have. Careering through questionable stereotypes and amusing self-owns, Tracy Olive and Dewayne Perkins’s screenplay is at its best as it pushes the characters towards hilarious creative cowardice. “What, me?”
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The Blackening returns to such themes intermittently, but much of the last act is taken up with ho-hum horror that comes too close to playing it straight. Are we supposed to be scared or are we supposed to be laughing at the absurdity of it all? Happily, the actors throw enough energy at the screen to deflect any incoming frustration. An odd beast.
