You know what they say: It’s all fun and games ’til someone brings a crossbow to the party.
Let’s be clear: There wasn’t supposed to be a crossbow in attendance at all. The weekend was supposed to be all fun and all games. That’s what these old college friends had in mind when they gather for a college reunion over Juneteenth weekend. (Well, that and drugs. And occasionally some possibly misguided romance. But mostly fun and games.)
But when these old pals travel to an out-of-the-way cabin in the woods, they realize that someone—perhaps several someones—have crashed the party. And the game they want to play isn’t fun at all.
But it does involve an actual game. They find it in cabin’s appropriately named “game room,” sitting on a table all by its lonesome. It’s called The Blackening, and as soon as the friends open the box, they can see it’s not something you’d find on the shelves of Walmart. A cartoonish face, with exaggerated and offensive racial features straight from the Jim Crow era, stares back at the players. The cards all contain questions connected to various stereotypes or tropes connected to Black culture.
“It probably runs on racism,” one guy suggests. And it soon becomes clear that the cabin’s guests are playing for their lives.
Take, for instance, the game’s first card—riffing on what clearly is a horror-movie scenario.
“In your predicament, the black character is always the first to die,” the card reads. “I will spare your lives if you sacrifice the person you deem the blackest.”
The blackest? What kind of messed-up game is this? You’re going take a group of inseparable friends who take pride in their shared racial identity and separate one of them for being the most … Black? Horrific. Absolutely horrific.
But (the friends admit), Shanika does use the n-word a lot. And King? He says he’s not a gangster anymore, but he still brought a gun to the party. Oh, and don’t forget Nnamdi, who literally came from Africa. (Not true, Nnamdi says. His mom came from Africa, but he was born in the Bronx, so there.) Soon, they’re all arguing for their continued existence by distancing themselves from their Black identity.
Meanwhile, a killer in an offensive blackface mask taps his toes, caresses his crossbow and waits for the real game to begin.
OK, so perhaps these longtime pals got a little overzealous for a minute or two, what with each trying to, um, out-white the other. But friendship can survive even a killer with a crossbow. In fact, some friendships grow stronger as the night wears on. And a few characters here engage in acts of bravery to save others, which is nice.
And while the whole party expresses, shall we say, a deep mistrust of law enforcement, a white lawman proves to be (as he repeatedly insists) one of the “good ones.”
But The Blackening isn’t really about setting an example or giving us heroes we should aspire to emulate or, really, any deep lessons. That’s not its intent. This is both parody and commentary. It’s a comic look at Black culture and slasher-movie tropes that also toys with an important question: What does it mean to be Black in America today. It’s a movie designed to make its audiences jump, laugh—and maybe think (just a little) on their way home.
A character exudes sort of a New Age vibe, and there’s a reference to the traditional Hindu greeting “namaste.”
A character wears a prominent earring with a cross on it. One character sings a verse of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” often referred to (as it is here) as the Black National Anthem. The song is filled with references to God and spiritual imagery.
Some characters can communicate through comic telepathy.
Two of the friends we meet—Nnamdi and Lisa—have a long and complicated history with each other. The two were an item back in college, but Nnamdi also habitually cheated on Lisa.
No matter: Ten years later, the two are back together. While both are trying to keep their relationship a secret from most of their friends, it doesn’t stay secret from the moviegoer for long. We see Nnamdi and Lisa kiss in the hallway, after which they soon depart for a bedroom to engage in more intimate activities. A couple of people comment very crudely and suggestively on what Lisa smells like afterward.
When the relationship is discovered, Lisa’s gay friend, Dewayne, feels particularly betrayed, remembering how often he comforted Lisa when Nnamdi’s philandering was discovered. But other people mention Nnamdi’s reputation for sleeping around, too.
Dewayne’s own sexual orientation is referred to a handful of times. He uses his “gayness” as a way to prove that he’s not the most Black member of their clique, associating those sexual preferences more with white culture. He wears a jacket that seems to refer to the wearer as a “b–ch” throughout most of the movie. Under the influence of MDMA, Dewayne also performs an impromptu strip tease, stopping at his underwear.
Another couple engages in a bit of suggestive banter, with a woman promising a man that she’ll touch him sexually if he does her a favor.
The Blackening is about 75% comedy, 25% slasher pic. But don’t sleep on the slasher side of the aisle. Things get bloody.
A crossbow, as mentioned, is the killer’s primary weapon. Several people get shot by it (one multiple times). One character is fatally, and somewhat graphically, skewered through the neck. And he’s not the only fatality via crossbow. Others die after falling from some significant heights and (in a particularly Clue-like twist) by being pummeled by a hefty candlestick. Blood flies and spatters and grosses pretty much everyone out (though the camera avoids looking at the victim during the attack). We’ll not count up the bodies, but we can say not every character listed in the credits is alive to see them.
Someone is stabbed in the foot. A character swims across a lake while crossbow bolts are fired. People fall down and out of trees. Someone is tied up. Many, many lives are threatened. Guns are drawn and fired. Someone is stabbed to death. We hear about a tragic car accident.
Nearly 100 f-words and at least 45 s-words. We also hear plenty of uses of “a–,” “b–ch,” “d–n,” “h—” and about 30 uses of the n-word. God’s name is misused about 20 times, including four with the word “d–n.” We hear repeated uses of a crude term referring to male anatomy.
As mentioned, drugs are part of the draw for this particular weekend. The party drug MDMA, colloquially called “Molly” throughout the film, and at least a couple of characters use it.
One character also takes the prescription drug Adderall, and it impacts her mightily. (We see the world from her foggy, reality-bending point of view a few times.)
Someone mixes a drink made of vodka, Kool-Aid and sugar—though it seems like the primary (and most bothersome) ingredient is actually the sugar. Characters smoke marijuana, as well as drinking wine and beer. A table is filled with bottles and cans. Shrooms and “herbs” are also namechecked.
A man at a gas station spits tobacco.
Race and racism are obviously a huge theme in The Blackening, and we see a number of offensive symbols and tropes in play here. There’s that cartoonish, offensive caricature on “The Blackening” game, for starters. An old-fashioned TV plays banjo music while another “Sambo-like” person (as the character is described in dialogue here) appears on the screen. The mask that the killer wears is a contorted blackface visage. We see a Confederate flag as well.
When characters are trying to save their lives by stressing that they’re not the Blackest person in the room, one admits that he voted for Trump—twice. The rest of the group is livid, and this admission is brought up a few more times during the course of the movie.
Dewayne mentions that he tends to vomit when he gets stressed or scared. We see the predictably disgusting results of such stress, and Someone spends his next few minutes of screen time covered in vomit.
Let’s this out of the way from the get-go: I’m white. The Blackening is proudly and intentionally steeped in the tropes of Black culture. Because of that, there are elements here that just might sail right over my head.
But here’s what I do understand.
One, The Blackening is pretty funny.
Two, it’s pretty problematic.
Obviously, the film deals extensively with racism and is loaded with purposefully offensive racial tropes. The characters themselves play off those tropes, along with a whole bevy of cultural stereotypes. This isn’t just a movie about being Black, but speculating about the meaning of being Black. As the game’s first card suggests, there’s a hint of a gradient in play—degrees of “Blackness” that the movie both mocks and mulls.
The movie’s other issues are easier to explain and more difficult to excuse. The language, of course, jumps well past excessive and lands closer to ridiculously excessive territory. Drug use here is surprisingly common and completely excused. And while The Blackening avoids nudity, its frequent sexual banter still feels quite crude and gratuitous. Likewise, though the movie avoids extreme gore, blood is not just shed, but splattered.
Movies such as The Blackening might feel to some like fun and games. But this R-rated tale carries a content crossbow with it—and that’s not a fun game at all.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
