Expanding a skit by comedy group 3Peat, and riffing on the well-known horror trope of the black character most often being the first to die, The Blackening is a slasher comedy that I was looking forward to for some time. The marketing was pretty good, and the tagline - "we can't all die first" - was brilliantly on point.
There's a small prologue showing a couple of people in danger, but then it's business as usual. A group of people meet up at a cabin in the woods, all there for an overdue bit of quality time with their friends during the Juneteenth holiday (a date that celebrates the end of slavery in the USA). Unfortunately, someone has set up a deadly game for them to participate in. That game involves answering various questions revolving around black culture, with a wrong answer due to result in great pain, and even death. It might be time, this time around, for the "least black" main characters to be endangered ahead of the others. But that pits our characters against one another, as they start to prove their race credentials to one another, playing on stereotypes and clichés that are also subverted as things start to twist and turn on the way to a final act revealing the killer and motivation.
Written by Tracy Oliver (who has delivered a number of fun scripts in the past 6-7 years) and Dewayne Perkins (a member of 3Peat, and someone with a decent selection of TV credits to his name already), The Blackening is a film full of potential, and the first half hits pretty much every target. Director Tim Story has been in the game long enough to handle the material with a steady guiding hand, and the simplicity of the setting keeps the focus on the various friendships and rivalries within the main group of characters.
The cast all have fun in their roles, whether they're playing things broadly or allowed to be more low-key, and I think everyone did their best to ensure that the script was delivered as well as could be. Grace Byers, Melvin Gregg, X Mayo, Antoinette Robertson, Perkins (hey, if you co-write a screenplay then you may as well give yourself a part), Jermaine Fowler, Sinqua Walls, Jay Pharoah, and Yvonne Orji interact well with one another, and convince when faced with a masked killer, and Diedrich Bader is good fun as the aptly-named Ranger White, a character who spends a lot of time ensuring that his words aren't misconstrued when his priority should be stopping a killing spree.
Sadly, as is often the case with many horror comedies, the biggest problem here is the balance of the genre elements. There are some great laughs here, with the script often never too far away from a smart and witty observation, but there aren't any real scares or tension (decent opening sequence aside). Which means that the third act, where laughs are a bit less frequent, stumbles along to resolve everything with an underwhelming sigh. It's so disappointing that it drags down the entire movie, but there's still just enough here to make it worth a watch. And you have to bear in mind that I am saying this as a plain white Brit, so I am sure there are many African American people who will get even more out of it than I did.
A great concept, well-realised during a number of scenes, but it's a shame that there couldn't have been a better handling of the horror elements alongside the comedy. Maybe they'll do better with that if there's a sequel.
6/10
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