THE ANGRY BLACK GIRL AND HER MONSTER

The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster, RLJE Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 8, 2023

"If death is a disease, then there must be a cure," says the protagonist of The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster. In case that sentiment doesn't quite register as familiar, this is a modern-day update of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, set in an anonymous neighborhood where, as a young boy who has seen and had to deal with a lot of death and violence, "life is cheap." This teenage girl has lost a mother in the crossfire of a shooting and an older brother by way of his direct involvement in a local gang. Her father isn't dead, but he is dealing with drug addiction after losing his only son—only for the young man's body to mysteriously disappear on top of it all.

It's obvious that writer/director Bomani J. Story, making his feature debut, has something to say with this loose adaptation of the 1818 novel, but as for what specifically that message may be, it's at best confused and more generally lost within this unfocused narrative. The movie attempts to make a science-fiction horror tale out of the very real horrors of its backdrop, and by the end, Story is far more interested in taking the genre conventions to their conclusion than in bridging the gap between that genre and the real-world concerns within this plot.

The girl of the title is Vicaria (Laya DeLeon Hayes), a brilliant, curious, and rather stubborn teen. We first meet her in the midst of those aforementioned deaths—as a young girl, embraced by her mother as a stray bullet instantly kills her, and more recently, finding the dead body of her elder brother Chris (Edem Atsu-Swanzy) in a field after he has been shot. The brother's body vanishes, by the way, because Vicaria drags it from that field to her secret laboratory in an abandoned power station in the neighborhood.

Her theory, much like the protagonist of the Shelley novel, is that death can be cured, and she has been stealing bodies from the area in order to dissect and experiment on the corpses. The logistics of most of this, especially Vicaria's use of electricity in her experiments in such a way that feels at least a century out of date (One imagines that, if the solution to resurrecting the dead were just a matter of putting enough voltage through a corpse, someone would have figured it out well before the present day), don't make much, if any, sense. Because Story opens the movie with so much information and reality-based inspiration, it's mostly easy enough to overlook that.

The whole thing, in theory, is more of a metaphor, anyway. Here's a girl who has grown up—quite literally in one moment at least—in the shadow of death, and it has not ceased since then. There are shootings by the local gang, run by drug dealer Kango (Denzel Whitaker), and retaliations for the violence. The presence of the police is a constant, and they're directly responsible for one death here, before Story uses another act of violence by some cops as the impetus for even more senseless bloodshed.

There's a significant question circling this plot, which sees Vicaria using some gadgets and a local transformer to resurrect her dead brother's body, of course. Is the entire background of this story sincere or simply exploitative? It's probably safe to say that Story's intentions are sincere, because the filmmaker raises so many specters of the real world in material that, theoretically, doesn't need them, if the whole point is simply to give us a contemporary spin on the world's most famous "monster" tale.

It's difficult, though, to say that the movie itself comes across as sincere, since so many of those ideas—about the cyclical nature of violence, the epidemic of drug addiction, the problem of over-policing, and the fundamental systemic racism of a society that created and perpetuates such issues—are raised without really being addressed or explored. There is, after all, this movie's "monster" with which to deal—not to mention the subplots of the father's addiction, Kango and his gang's attempts to enlist Vicaria in manufacturing drugs, and a struggle for power within the gang. The very notion of the resurrected Chris, born out of violence and raised by Vicaria's righteous sense of injustice, is based on such a powerful combination of ideas that it's a shame this "monster" simply and ultimately becomes a source for some jump scares, fake-outs, and brutal attacks.

Much of the plot is thin and/or repetitive (There are back-to-back scenes of Kango threatening Vicaria, with only a short interlude of time passing between them), but more importantly, those concerns become the focal point of The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster. There's a potential potent idea here—a few of them, in fact. They're not nearly enough, though, for Story's obvious ambitions with this material to rise above predictable conventions and uncertain execution.

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