THE BLACKENING - Mark Reviews Movies

The Blackening, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 15, 2023

One of the common clichés of horror movies, now commonly referenced as a joke or an outrage in our post-postmodern era, is that a Black character inevitably will be the first to die. The Blackening, an inherently clever but formally unfocused horror-comedy, offers a couple of suggestions as to why that was so often the case.

The first is that the actors playing those characters in certain movies were too famous for the production to afford, and that suggestion comes from characters played by Jay Pharoah and Yvonne Orji, arguably the most famous of the actors to appear in this movie. Both of them look directly at the camera after offering that idea, and it's a good joke (that probably could have landed better with—no offense to either Pharoah or Orji, who are both quite funny here—a pair of more obviously famous actors). Beyond that, though, it announces that Tracy Oliver and star Dewayne Perkins' screenplay wants us to know that it knows exactly what it's trying to do.

The second suggestion for why Black characters are so regularly killed off in horror movies is that, if they weren't, the whole formula of those stories would collapse. The characters here, a group of friends from college having a Juneteenth reunion at a remote cabin in the woods, are on to the game the movie is playing, even before a literal game comes into play in this story.

They've seen those movies, but beyond the self-referential nature of the premise, these characters have lived in the United States, know the country's history, and recognize the deeper meaning of witnessing so many fictional Black people be killed off first in so many horror offerings. Even if they weren't in a horror movie, there would be plenty of reason for this group of characters to be suspicious, anxious, and distrustful of their surroundings and anyone they don't know—especially a forest ranger with a surname that redundantly emphasizes why he's worthy of no little amount of doubt.

Oliver and Perkins' script is admirable for the way it allows these ideas to define the story, as well as all of the choices the characters make, either consciously or grudgingly, or don't make over the course of a night of terror. The decision does toy with the formula of a traditional horror story, while also injecting it with plenty of smart humor. It's difficult to tell, though, if director Tim Story knows how to juggle this mix of thrills and comedy, while getting to the core of the cinematic satire that's so blatantly infused into the material.

There's just something off about the rhythm, timing, and pacing of the scares and jokes here. To be fair to Story, he has been tasked with dramatizing a script that's dense with gags, social commentary, self-referential humor, scare sequences that are both clear-cut and turned on their heads, and a central conceit that requires all of these elements to exist together. All of it feels crammed together with little consideration for how the material functions as comedy, horror, and satire.

The plot, after Pharoah and Orji's characters are dismissed by a masked killer, has a group of seven friends/acquaintances arriving at the cabin. Lisa (Antoinette Robertson) comes with her best friends Allison (Grace Byers) and Dewayne (Perkins), neither of whom know she has started dating her ex Nnamdi (Sinqua Walls), a notorious womanizer. He and King (Melvin Gregg), a reformed gangster, dig at each other about whether or not either of them has actually changed before Shanika (X Mayo) shows up with the nerdy Clifton (Jermaine Fowler) in tow.

The main gimmick revolves around a board game, which seems tailored specifically to the group, features trivia questions about Black history and pop culture, and has a grossly racist caricature as its centerpiece. They're forced to play it by some unknown threat—or else one of the early arrivals at the cabin will be murdered.

Just as with the game the characters play, the screenplay is littered with information. There are pop-culture references, pieces of history ("Would Rosa Parks sit down?" one character asks in the middle of a chase, leading to the befuddled response, "That's exactly what she did"), and a level of self-awareness that makes us see everything through a variety of lenses—of dismantling and subverting certain cultural stereotypes, of dissecting and playing into an assortment of horror clichés, of seeing how much of this scenario could be perceived as or directly is a threat.

Some of the threat is as trivial as an open door, which doesn't need to be investigated for reasons that characters in a different horror movie might not realize, and a lot of it is as overt as a crossbow-wielding psycho wearing a mask that mirrors the caricature at the center of the game's board. That these characters can see it all—and recognize what could be fatal errors, such as splitting up—is an amusing touch, even if the third act seems to forget that awareness for certain jokes and scares to appear.

The cast keeps up with all of it, to be sure. The Blackening, though, never quite reaches the full extent of its potential, because Story doesn't so much direct the shifts and flow of the material as he assembles it and hopes for the best.

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