The Blackening (2023): "nobody plays spades in Vermont!"

★★★

SPOILERS BELOW

A remote cabin in the woods. An insidious (and incredibly racist) board game. Every single ridiculous horror trope you've ever seen laid bare and demolished with a massive candlestick (you'll get that when you see the movie) in a tight hour and a half.

Enter- with all the subtlety of a crossbow to the chest- The Blackening.

The Blackening follows a group of college friends who gather in a cabin in the woods for a reunion/Juneteenth weekend. The couple of the group, Morgan and Shawn- arrive at the cabin early and stumble upon a game room containing a mysterious board game called The Blackening, which features a speaker inside of what appears to be the depiction of a minstrel's head. An ominous voice uses to tell them that they are locked in the room, and the only way out is to draw a card from the game and answer correctly.

The question? Name one black character to survive a horror movie. In the first of many hammer-over-the-head meta moments, Shawn answers with Jada Pinkett Smith and Omar Epps in Scream 2, and is promptly shot in the neck with a crossbow.

By the time the opening titles roll, we know exactly what we're in for- a ballsy, cheesy slasher that feels like a distant cousin of the Scary Movie franchise, filled to the brim with overt social and racial commentary.

What Works:

If one thing is true about The Blackening, it's this- it is a movie with something to say. The social commentary is obvious and it is unflinching. Diedrich Bader's Officer White, a local police officer who gives the characters a hard time for trying to get into the cabin earlier in the movie, gives us the clearest set ups to one of these moments when he returns to the cabin on a wellness check and finds the group attempting to make their great escape. Officer White makes a pointed comment about being "one of the good ones" and ushers the group to his police car before being massacred by the killer's crossbow.

No white saviors here.

A similar moment comes when the group is forced by the killer to choose and sacrifice who among them is the "blackest," and the character Clifton is chosen when he reveals he voted for Trump- twice. The Blackening made no effort to tone things down or coddle a white audience- and those unexpectedly brazen moments are a big part of its charm.

What truly made this movie worth watching in my opinion though, was the chemistry between its cast. The friend group is a motley crew consisting of: on-again-off-again-college-sweethearts Lisa and Nnamdi (Antoinette Robertson and Sinqua Walls), former gangster King (Melvin Gregg), gay best friend Dewayne (Dewayne Perkins), biracial punching bag Allison (Grace Byers), party queen Shanika (X Mayo), and nerdy outcast revealed to be the mastermind behind the murders, Clifton (Jermaine Fowler). Even in the beginning of the film before the action begins, no part of the revelation of the dynamics and relationships at play feels like exposition. The connection between the cast members and the perfectly casual dialogue between them makes it feel as though you're watching a group of real friends interact. It's what makes one of the best running jokes truly work- a bit in which characters lock eye contact and have an entire conversation solely through looks (and voiceover, of course).

What Doesn't:

Where The Blackening truly struggles is its tone- or rather the imbalance of it. Labelling itself a "horror-comedy," The Blackening seems to wildly swing between the two genres, rather than meld them together. Elements of both genres land, but they land far out on their opposite ends rather than meeting towards the middle, and it can take a viewer out of the experience from moment to moment.

One sequence shows the friend group watching, horrified, as Morgan is displayed on a screen tied to a chair, all of their lives being threatened by the disembodied board game voice, and the very next moment being a long gag about the lack of diversity in Friends. In the same vein, the twin killers of the film were truly terrifying, with hulking frames, blackface masks, and chilling voices. So, when an Adderall-fueled Allison defeats one with mud on her face like tribal paint and a fistful of broken arrows, you're not laughing so much as wondering how three little cuts could possible do anything to the malevolent force the beginning of the movie has set up.

Final Thoughts:

Regular readers are probably beginning to see a pattern in the things I write about: fun is just as important to me as quality. While The Blackening left much to be desired, it didn't even come close to negating how much fun I had watching it. Everything was so over-the-top and corny that you couldn't help but have a good time, whether it was watching Dewayne's mollied out dance routine or Shanika being shot at with arrows as she tried to swim across a lake to safety.

It was refreshing to see a movie that so clearly stated what it wanted to without backing away, where most movies now take such a large step back from a firm stance that they don't end up meaning anything. I just wish that the horror and comedy of it all had synced up to do the best beats of each justice.

The Blackening hits theaters June 16!