The Blackening Parent Guide

With a big college reunion planned, friends Lisa, Dewayne, and Nmadi (Antoinette Robertson, Dewayne Perkins, and Sinqua Walls) are spending the weekend out at a cute little cabin in the woods. They’re meeting up with more old college buddies, King (Melvin Gregg), Shanika (X Mayo), Allison (Grace Byers), Morgan (Yvonne Orji), Shawn (Jay Pharoah), and Clifton (Jermaine Fowler). Morgan and Shawn arrived but left a note for the others that they’d be back later in the evening, and to get partying without them – instructions the rest of the group are happy to follow.

The friends soon find a specially labelled “Game Room”, which sounds fun – until the door locks behind them. Inside is a cartoonishly racist board game called “The Blackening”, complete with a talking minstrel head that gives them instructions. Worse yet, the head knows everyone’s name, and more besides. Chillingly, it reveals that Shawn and Morgan aren’t out shopping. Shawn is dead, and Morgan is a hostage. If the survivors fail to play the game, she will die. But playing along with whoever designed this little board game of horrors might not be a good idea either…

The Blackening is an extremely mixed bag. The social satire and racial commentary are interesting and nuanced, and the film does an excellent job of exploring racialized tropes in horror films. The rest of the movie, on the other hand, is seriously wanting. Casual dialogue ranges from average to dreadful (much to the delight of the viewers sitting behind me, but likely not to the enjoyment of anybody in full command of their mental faculties). The film is also very, well, dark, and I’m not speaking metaphorically here. Almost every shot is seriously under-lit, making it difficult to follow the action and annoying to try and take notes in the theater (more my problem than yours). As if to compensate, there’s some truly gnarly lens flare on some of the light sources which even J.J. Abrams would have removed. It’s messy at best.

This production is a hard sell for sensitive audiences, particularly in the profanity department. We’re clocking more f-bombs than minutes here, and that’s without counting any of the other cussing. There’s also some heavy drinking, MDMA use, and graphic violence, which you might have expected from the genre. I was prepared for the profanity, I was prepared for the violence, and I was expecting to have a really good time with the concept – and I did. I just kept getting dragged right back out of that enjoyment by the sloppy filmmaking and inconsistent writing. The real surprise here is that, considering that director Tim Story also directed the cinematic abomination Tom and Jerry, is that any part of this film is compelling. Baby steps, I suppose.