The Blackening review
It was probably going to be impossible for The Blackening to exceed expectations. The film’s premise of spoofing and upending tropes on black characters in horror movies could take seven movies to fully do justice.
While it felt like there were plenty of jokes and cliches left to address, The Blackening is a satisfying and funny opening salvo. There’s certainly no reason this can’t become a franchise or at least stretch out to a trilogy.
Right from the tagline — we can’t all die first — it was clear this was going to be a unique horror experience.
Director Tim Story is used to handling hybrid films like the action comedy Ride Along series, superhero/family Fantastic Four films and rom coms Think Like a Man. Story has solid instincts when to ease up on one aspect of the genre merge to bring the other to the forefront.
And he’s got no problem tackling a larger ensemble.
As fresh as the plot is, screenwriters Tracy Oliver (Girls Trip, Harlem) and Dewayne Perkins do have to lean into some genre rules. This plays out in a terrific opening scene featuring Yvonne Orji and Jay Pharaoh, the first of a group of college friends that play The Blackening board game.
Soon the rest of their crew arrives to this isolated cabin in the woods. Lisa (Antoinette Robertson), Allison (Grace Byers, Empire) and Dewayne arrive at the same time as King (Melvin Gregg, Snowfall) and Nnamdi (Sinqua Walls, White Men Can’t Jump). Eventually the final two, Shanika (X Mayo) and Clifton (Jermaine Fowler, Coming 2 America), arrive to officially kick off the Juneteenth festivities of spades, drinking and partying.
The group dynamic is fun as the cast convincingly portrays longtime friends who haven’t kicked it like “the old days” for far too long.
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An uninvited party crasher forces them to play a very offensive looking board game. The crew must correctly answer a series of questions in order to save one of their friends. This proves another highlight scene as the ensemble can just bounce off each other. Perkins might have co-written a juicy role for himself, but the other characters all get moments to shine as well.
Byers, Mayo and Gregg are standouts while Walls definitely provides that cliche main hero energy. Robertson checks off all the Final Girl boxes with her performance. The cast’s strong interaction makes a decidedly non-horror movie layout the correct decision.
For a murder mystery, Oliver and Perkins telegraph the killer’s identity way too early on. This kills off the suspense prematurely but there are some decent twists along the way. Yet even with the big reveal it seemed like there was a missed opportunity for an even more effective payoff. Oliver and Perkins do cover their bases to ensure the film holds up to further inspection/repeated views.
The Blackening is a horror movie comedy that needed just a bit of extra seasoning. It’s so close to being an elite example of the genre held back by just a few shaky decisions.
Rating: 8 out of 10
Photo Credit: Lionsgate