Mark Reviews Movies: KAREN

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 2, 2021

Everything about Karen is so broadly imagined and portrayed—as a thriller and as a social commentary—that it almost becomes a parody of its own intentions. The plot and the movie's point are about a racist woman who can't stomach the fact that a Black couple has moved in next door. She's going to do something about it, although the something changes with almost every scene, because writer/director Coke Daniels isn't here to tell a story. He's here to state a message.

That message is trite: This woman is a racist, and racists will do horrible things to the people they irrationally hate. As the premise of a thriller, this could work, but as a story in which the message is the point, there's almost no reason for its existence.

The biggest downfall is that Karen (Taryn Manning) is overtly and inescapably racist from the very start. She doesn't hide it. When Malik (Cory Hardrict) and his wife Imani (Jasmine Burke) move into the house next door in her gated community, Karen responds by installing security cameras aimed directly at her new neighbors' home.

Even before that, she's talking to the manager to get two Black men, who dare to laugh a few tables over from her, kicked out of a restaurant. After that, there are scenes in which Karen can barely go a sentence without using the phrase "you people."

At a party with Malik and Imani's family and friends, she's complaining about talk of the history of slavery (after making a point of defining Imani's cooking as "slaving away in the kitchen), discussions of unjustified police harassment and assaults and shootings, and why people can't agree about "all lives" mattering (The movie ends, by the way, with a counter to that argument, in the form of a lecture, which feels like pandering to an audience that will dismiss this movie outright, simply from the setup). The line that finally gets Karen kicked out of the house has to do with suggesting the party attendees can just return a specific continent, if they hate all of this so much.

A smarter, more pointed movie might have been about how Karen's racism is hidden—either unspoken or more subtly expressed. Isn't that the actual history of prejudice throughout the world and, specifically, in this country?

An argument for racial segregation becomes one of "free association." The old literacy requirements for voting are abandoned, and laws requiring identification or the act of gerrymandering take their place. Displaying symbols or honoring historical figures that represent systemic racism, as the Confederate decorations in Karen's bathroom do, become a matter of "history." Racism doesn't change, but racists certainly evolve—definitely not socially or mentally, but assuredly in terms of how they use language.

Karen, though, isn't that character or a reflection of current standards and tactics of racism. She's just an awful, terrible person—irredeemable, incapable of change, increasingly threatening toward Malik, Imani, and any other African-American man, woman, or child whom she encounters.

The other major downfall here is that Karen is, in a way, the focal point of this tale. Malik and Imani have lives—jobs and a plan to have a baby—and personalities, but they exist here to inevitably become victims of Karen and, later, her cop brother Mike (Roger Dorman, growling like a feral beast).

They occasionally fight back, such as when Imani has cameras installed on her own house, but they mostly just never figure out that, sometimes, it's fine to ignore one's neighbors. It's most certainly acceptable not to invite them to parties, for example, or, in a more extreme example from this movie, stand there having a conversation with a neighbor who has broken into your house, packing a pistol and with eyes filled with murder.

The result is that we have to talk about Karen—how she's more a caricature than an actual person, how Daniels oddly gives her an unquestioned back story that almost seems to be offering her some sympathy, how all of this and more about the character only work against the notion that racism is real, irrational, often covered up with other and superficially acceptable ideas, and potentially dangerous and/or deadly. She's the only thing about which Karen seems to really care, and that's a miscalculation of disastrous proportions.

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