Review of The Blackening, directed by Tim Story

I remember when I saw The Blackening was at my local AMC Theaters, I was so bummed out that I couldn’t see it.

For some reason they only had night showings in the middle of the week, so when I was looking up the showtimes to see if they could fit into my schedule, they just didn’t because of the fact I’m a graduate student.

All of my classes are at night in the middle of the workweek, and by the time I get home it’s already like 10 PM and I’m ready to go to sleep. So I waited t watch this movie until I was at my local library one day and saw a DVD copy of it.

I ended up popping the movie into the DVD player when I was doing work for the Smithsonian, which is where I was interning at in the past semester (when writing this).

There were some days when I really got ahead of my work and needed something to do because of it, which means that I would just watch movies or read instead of asking for more work to do, as I wasn’t paid and didn’t feel like I needed to do more than what I was already doing (I write this as someone who is very efficient at getting work done).

Anyways, I’m rambling! Let’s get into the review.

A group of friends find themselves caught in a demented game.

The Blackening begins with a girl and a guy, Morgan and Shawn, coming to a cabin in the woods.

They're talking about how they’ve come her to celebrate Juneteenth with all of their friends, but when they head into the cabin’s basement, they discover a game called The Blackening living down there.

It comes with an old racist Sambo doll that used to be popular decades ago, but when they’re looking at it and thinking about how it is, the lights cut off suddenly. A voice conjures out of nowhere and tells them to play the game.

Unable to refuse, they are given the first question and Shawn gets it wrong. He is then shot in the neck with an arrow, and when Morgan tries to escape, she is taken away.

A day passes and all of their friends arrive, discussing the newest gossip. When one of the friends, en route to the excursion, runs into another classmate named Clifton, he reveals he will be joining them.

They arrive at the cabin, and a ranger is denying them entry into the cabin, but they convince him they rented it and its all theirs to have.

They start partying, drinking and doing drugs. The question arises at who invited Clifton, as he’s not a part of the core group, and the lights go out. They head into the basement and find The Blackening, and pieces are set up corresponding to their respective personalities. The voice then begins talking to them, and says he is holding Morgan prisoner.

He then asks them questions about African American culture, and when they fail to answer a question about Black actors who’ve been on the television show Friends, Morgan is attacked.

They are then told to sacrifice the one who is deemed to be the least Black of the group, and they decide on Clifton after he admits he voted for Trump two times. He is then show in the chest by an arrow, and the group, freed from the room, decide to split up.

The Ranger from before shows up, and they convince him to help them, but he is then killed by the killer.

The other group runs into the killer, they take him down and manage to kill him, but when they take off the mask they realize it was the guy from the gas station.

A second killer appears then, and they kill him, but it turns out he was the clerk’s twin brother. The group smashes their thoughts together to realize that these thugs were probably just hired by someone else.

They head into another room, where they find the bodies of the ranger and Clifton. It’s time for the evil villain moment, as Clifton reveals himself as alive this entire time and shows us that he was the true villain all along.

He has trauma from college as the friend group doubted his level of blackness, he started drinking because of it, and then he accidentally killed a woman while drunk driving.

He went to prison for the DUI, and now he wants his revenge because he blames them. He will kill them all and dump their bodies in the well with Shawn and Morgan’s corpses, but the group overpowers him and throws him into the well, supposedly killing him in the process.

They call the fire department instead of the cops the next morning, and are sprayed with a hose.

Overall Thoughts

Not the greatest movie when it comes to plot and figuring out what had exactly happened here, but it was entertaining for the brief amount of time that it has on my screen.

There’s some great satire woven into the jokes here, especially when it comes to the horror elements, and I think that they do a great job of inverting the racial stereotypes that are being critiqued upon here.

I hope we get more movies like this in the future, although this wasn’t my absolute favorite in the end.

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