FILM
THE BLACKENING
THE ‘BLACK GUY DIES FIRST’ TROPE GETS A WELCOME RIPOSTE
★★★
Allison (Grace Byers), not keen on playing this game.
Lisa (Antoinette Robertson) comes over all Cluedo.
OUT 25 AUGUST / CERT 15 / 97 MINS
DIRECTOR Tim Story
CAST Dewayne Perkins, Grace Byers, Jermaine Fowler, Melvin Gregg, X Mayo, Antoinette Robertson, Sinqua Walls, Jay Pharoah
PLOT College friends hold a reunion in an isolated woodland retreat and are tormented by a games-playing psycho with a grudge.
IN A NOD to both Scream and Saw, The Blackening opens with a couple (Yvonne Orji, Jay Pharoah) arriving early at the lavish cabin in the woods where their all-Black friend group is holding a ten-years-after-college get-together on Juneteenth — only to find a creepily racist talking board-game in the basement. This promises death if they can’t name a Black actor who survives a horror movie, with fatal consequences if they get Jada Pinkett Smith’s performances in Scream 2 and Demon Knight mixed up. After the prologue, a long stretch introduces characters and establishes complicated personal relationships. Observational stand-up material about Black culture plays out with the occasional masked lurker or false scare to keep the horror pot boiling.