REVIEW: The Blackening (2023, dir. Tim Story)

Certificate: 15

Running Time: 97 mins

UK Distributor: Universal Pictures

WHO’S IN THE BLACKENING?

Grace Byers, Jermaine Fowler, Melvin Gregg, X Mayo, Dewayne Perkins, Antoinette Robertson, Sinqua Walls, Jay Pharaoh, Yvonne Orji, Diedrich Bader, James Preston Rogers

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

Tim Story (director, producer), Tracy Oliver (writer, producer), Dewayne Perkins (writer), Sharla Sumpter Bridgett, Marcei A. Brown, Jason Clark and E. Brian Dobbins (producers), Dexter Story (composer), Todd A. Dos Reis (cinematographer), Peter S. Elliot (editor)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

A group of Black friends find themselves targeted by a vengeful killer…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON THE BLACKENING?

Movies based on comedy sketches usually produce mixed results; after all, how do you stretch out a joke that could easily fill a six-or-seven-minute skit into a ninety-plus minute feature? Sometimes it works out, like The Blues Brothers and Wayne’s World (both of which were based on popular SNL sketches), but other times the joke is stretched far too thin, leaving very little of what originally worked about it intact (see: Good Burger, The Ladies Man, A Night at the Roxbury, and numerous others).

In the case of The Blackening, adapted from comedy troupe 3Peat’s viral Comedy Central short of the same name, there’s a fair amount that can be expanded on. The premise of the sketch is a group of Black friends who, whilst being chased by a serial killer in a slasher movie, debate who amongst them is “the Blackest” and therefore must be sacrificed, leading to a number of very funny arguments where they each try to one-up each other with their white attributes. That in and of itself opens up a number of comedic possibilities for a feature, particularly when discussing and satirising the roles in which Black people play in general horror movies, and the resulting film version touches upon all of that in smart and funny, if never consistently hilarious, ways.

The feature, directed by Tim Story, similarly follows a group of Black friends – Allison (Grace Byers), Lisa (Antoinette Robertson), King (Melvin Gregg), Nnamdi (Sinqua Walls), Dewayne (Dewayne Perkins, also one of the film’s writers), Shanika (X Mayo) and Clifton (Jermaine Fowler) – who get together at a remote cabin in the woods for a Juneteenth celebration. Before you can say, “wait, this set-up seems awfully familiar…” the friends are suddenly drawn into a deadly trap by a masked killer, who forces them to play a board game called The Blackening which depicts a racist caricature as its centrepiece and asks multiple questions relating to Black culture, including – yes – which one out of all of them is “the Blackest”.

It follows the typical slasher movie formula, and that is certainly the point for The Blackening is, like the sketch it’s based on, intended to be a parody of slashers rather than the genuine article. It invokes the spirit of Wes Craven’s original Scream by directly referencing a number of horror movies with prominent Black leads such as The People Under the Stairs (another Craven movie, funnily enough) and, of course, Get Out. Unlike Scream, however, such references are used far more sparingly, with a sterner focus on satirising the limited roles that Black people often play in not just horror movies but society in general, as pointed out during the titular board game which asks such questions as: “Name all the Black guest-stars on Friends,” or “Sing the lesser-known second verse of the official Black national anthem ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’.” More often than not, the ways in which it pokes fun at all these trivial, but no less damning, facts about Black culture land some strong laughs that you don’t necessarily have to be Black in order to understand (though, at times, it certainly helps if you are).

By the time that the film reaches the inevitable point where the original sketch simply plays out – not quite word-for-word, but close enough to still be pretty funny – there have been enough good comedic moments to justify its feature-length expansion. Most notable is a running gag where characters seem to telepathically communicate through simple glances at each other, which without giving anything away does have a pretty hilarious pay-off towards the end. Furthermore, the camaraderie between the actors is a lot of fun, with most of them riffing off one another but not to a point where they ramble for so long that the movie comes to a screeching halt. Even when some of the jokes don’t hit the mark, there is still a light chuckle from how one of the actors will deliver a certain line of dialogue or a reaction to a horrifying act, which goes to show how into it they all are.

However, when the film actually does try to be the kind of slasher movie that it’s parodying, it doesn’t entirely work. For one, the identity of the killer is almost insultingly easy to guess, because the movie heavily foreshadows who it is by the way that they’re acting and the suspiciously inconvenient things that happen to them. Also, while many of the actors are good at playing either into or against the archetypes that they’re making fun of, Jermaine Fowler is the only one among them who fails to convince in a role where he’s constantly acting like a stereotypically white preppy nerd a la Steve Urkel from Family Matters or Carlton from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, but in a way where it looks like he’s physically uncomfortable half of the time (the left side of his face is, for whatever reason, drooped down like he’s had a stroke), not to mention his are among the most jokes that fall flat. It’s the kind of overexaggerated performance you’d see in one of the Scary Movie films rather than something a lot smarter, and indeed funnier, like this, and at times it can be distracting with how much this kind of acting choice oddly doesn’t fit this otherwise undoubtedly comedic movie.

Though it doesn’t always get a laugh, nor does it entirely escape the limitations of the slasher movie formula, The Blackening does have enough thoughts in its brain and enough laughs in its gut to leave a fine impression as a comedy sketch adaptation that, for once, has more going for it than just the one joke.

SO, TO SUM UP…

The Blackening is an amusing Black-led parody of slasher movies that offers some thoughtful and funny commentary on Black culture, which a game cast helps steer out of some hit-or-miss gags and some formulaic trappings.