Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Bomani J. Story
Starring: Laya DeLeon Hayes, Denzel Whitaker, Chad Coleman, Reilly Brooke Stith,
Keith Sean Holliday, Amani Summer, Edem Atsu-Swanz
Victor Erice's 1973 fantasy drama The Spirit of the Beehive
has become one of the biggest influences on recent genre cinema.
Guillermo del Toro was perhaps the first to explicitly nod to Erice's
film with Pan's Labyrinth, which went so far as to borrow its Spanish civil war setting along
with its central theme of a child finding solace through their discovery
of a "monster." Since then we've seen movies like
A Monster Calls,
Martyrs Lane,
Slapface,
Piggy
and to some degree even the awful
Halloween Ends
all borrow The Spirit of the Beehive's template.
With his debut feature, writer/director Bomani J. Story offers
another take on this idea, but takes things right back to Erice's
influence, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
In many screen adaptations of Frankenstein, especially the Hammer films
with Peter Cushing in the role, Victor Frankenstein is portrayed as a
superior intellect frustrated by the world's inability to recognise his
talent. Story has come up with the novel idea of transposing the
character to a working class teenage African-American girl. Like her
predecessor, Vicaria (Laya DeLeon Hayes) is a genius whose
talents are unappreciated in her community. At school she gets in
trouble with a white teacher who views her willingness to debate
scientific theories as a form of aggression. On her estate the local
drug dealer, Kango (Denzel Whitaker), wants Vicaria to employ her
skills to his chemistry set.
But physics and biology are Vicaria's specialties. She's been
surrounded by death throughout her young life and now seeks to find a
way to conquer mortality. She believes death is a disease and that she
can find a cure through science.
When her older brother Chris (Edem Atsu-Swanzy) is gunned down
in a drug deal gone wrong, Vicaria steals his body and sets about
bringing him back to life. It's here that the film's social realism
begins to give way to fantasy, with Vicaria bringing Chris back to
"life" through the classic montage of crackling electricity. Story
assembles a clever sequence in which we see the house lights flash
around Vicaria's estate as she works her mad science.
Chris comes back, but to quote a Frankenstein influenced Stephen King
tale, sometimes dead is better. Looking like a cross between the hobo
Michael Myers in Rob Zombie's Halloween 2 and a
Rastafarian Leatherface, Chris stalks the estate at night, killing
indiscriminately. This makes Vicaria a target for Kango, and puts her
family in danger.
The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster shares many
similarities with the recent Spanish thriller Piggy. In that movie a plus-size teenage girl manipulates a serial killer
into targeting the girls who have made her life a misery, only to
realise she's unleashed a monster that can't be controlled. Story's film
treads a similar narrative path, but it never quite goes far enough.
There are hints at the darkness within Vicaria - like a striking scene
in which she watches intently as emergency workers try to resuscitate a
young boy shot by a cop; the look in her eyes suggesting she might be
hoping for the boy's demise so she can be the one to bring him back –
but her turn from "mad scientist" to conscientious heroine is devoid of
the sort of nuance found in classic angry anti-heroines like Sissy
Spacek's Carrie White. Vicaria has earned the right to be angry, so it
would have been nice for the film to indulge that anger. Why are we
denied the satisfaction of seeing Chris take out the white racist
teacher, for example?
Story's film becomes less interesting once its ambiguity is dismissed
in its final act. Making Chris a one-note monster and reducing a young
black man to a hulking killer would seem to miss the film's own point
about how African-Americans are pigeon-holed. The movie really cops out
with a coda that's so cheesy it plays like a tacked-on happy ending.
Despite its title,
The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster perhaps isn't angry
enough, but it provides enough jolts to spark new life into a classic
tale.
