This Afro-allegory about modern black America is also a neat little thriller
You may have been on some bad Tinder dates but nothing will ever be quite like the one that throws together two mismatched young black Americans in this gripping tale of romance flowering in the festering gutter of racism.
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It's a grimy portrait of modern America that fair crackles with nervous energy, a freewheeling allegory that is also a romantic road movie and a serious indictment of the US’s eternal and seemingly intractable problem with race.
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Watch our interview with writer Lena Waithe and director Melina Matsoukas
Angela "Queen" Johnson (Jodie Turner-Smith) and Earnest "Slim" Hines (Daniel Kaluuya) are a very unmatched couple. She’s a cynical attorney and he’s a chilled-out shoe salesman. A second date looks unlikely but when they’re pulled over by a trigger happy cop (played by country boogie merchant Sturgill Simpson), a series of nervy misjudgements ends with Slim killing the cop in self-defence and the reluctant couple, knowing all too well how these things turn out, going on the run.
Within hours they’re America’s Most Wanted, with a $500,000 reward on their heads and half the cops in the state in hot pursuit. They become innocent outlaws on a cross-country game of cat and mouse that quickly turns the duo into folk heroes and instant icons for a black America angry and fatigued by ingrained racism and injustice.
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Watch our interview with Jodie Turner-Smith and Daniel Kaluuya
As they duck and dive, change cars and clothes, Queen and Slim meet either support or suspicion along the way. They’re hidden like runaway slaves by white sympathisers (and as with Huck and Jim, the mighty Mississippi snakes through this story) or feted as folk heroes by the black community.
The performances from Turner-Smith and Kaluuya are excellent (although I wasn’t always convinced of their chemistry) and while some sequences are a little on the nose, the movie has a hypnotic way of drifting in and out of dreamlike abstraction; dialogue overlaps and images take on a magical Afro-spiritualism before harsh reality arrives with a jolt.
Making her feature debut, Melina Matsoukas (who has made countless pop videos and Beyoncé’s game-changing long-form film Formation), directs in a loose and vivid style. Call it a metaphysical date movie but one that embraces black history, birthright, family, and protest - wrapped up with all the energy and tension of a neat little thriller.
Alan Corr @CorrAlan2
