| Screen | Intermission |
THE BLACKENING 15
Death to cliches…
★★★★✩
OUT 23 AUGUST CINEMAS
It’s one of the most notorious tropes in slasher cinema: the Black character always dies first. But what happens when all the characters are Black? That’s the killer concept at the heart of this rollicking horror spoof. Director Tim Story (Barbershop, Ride Along, 2005’s Fantastic Four) skewers Hollywood convention and urban stereotypes in a rapid-fire satire that feels scathing yet affectionate.
Seven college friends rent a remote cabin (in the woods, naturally) for a weekend reunion and stumble on The Blackening, a board game centred on racist caricatures. Bewildered and bemused, they decide to play, triggering a video recording of a masked figure who puts the group through a series of Saw-like puzzles. Jokes are cracked, the mystery deepens and the strong young cast – including Sinqua Walls (White Men Can’t Jump), Antoinette Robertson (Dear White People) and Grace Byers (Empire) – is slowly winnowed down.
As with any self-respecting slasher, there’s a third-act twist. True, many viewers will guess the big reveal ahead of time (the cast is small, after all), but that’s not really what The Blackening is about. It’s not really about frights either (despite the jump-scare-filled trailer). Story and writers Tracy Oliver and Dewayne Perkins lean more into laughs, crafting a hangout comedy where the characters lay waste to stereotypes with smarts, style and charisma.
THE VERDICT An all-Black cast skewers slasher-film convention in a fast-paced, highly likeable and frequently hilarious spoof.
SCRAPPER 12
Estate of play…
★★★★✩
OUT 25 AUGUST CINEMAS
Twelve-year-old Georgie (Lola Campbell) doesn’t take any crap. In Charlotte Regan’s pleasingly light take on a dark theme, she’s contriving to live alone on an Essex council estate after mum Vicky (Olivia Brady) dies, fooling social services with fake phone responses from her ‘Uncle Winston Churchill’.
When her feckless young dad Jason (Triangle of Sadness’ Harris Dickinson) appears reluctantly from Ibiza, clumsy and clueless about a prickly child he’s never known, her relentless campaign to oust him reckons without his ingenuity – or her loneliness. Swerving both Ken Loach-style social realism and Aftersun’s heavy emotional heft, writer/ director Regan – making her feature debut – takes a playful, pastel-hued view of Georgie’s plight, as she and Jason circle one another.
Dotted with comic flourishes, the film pings between wit and grit, with a dad-and-daughter bike-thieving business and tough tween punch-ups. Despite all the Paper Moon-style bickering, newcomer Lola Campbell finds real pathos in the resilient Georgie, obsessively watching phone videos of her mum and pouring her grief into a secret project. Her brusquely perky performance, in which she often seems more grown-up than her dad, is a lovely fit with Dickinson’s laddish, shorttempered Jason, a man who can make being the tooth fairy look like a midnight robbery.
THE VERDICT An urban fairy tale about a fractured family, this deserved Sundance prize-winner is shot through with warmth and whimsy.