Director: Bomani J. Story
Stars: Chad L. Coleman, Laya DeLeon Hayes, Amani Summer
“Death is a disease,” we’re told in hushed whisper at the top of Bomani J. Story’s The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster, but the epidemic at the heart of this story is gang violence. Our weary, embittered narrator is Vicaria (Laya DeLeon Hayes), a teenage girl from the low-rise projects who’s taking a pragmatic approach to ‘curing’ death in her neighbourhood. If it can be thought of like a virus – a plague, a scourge – then it can be treated like one. Dubbed ‘the Mad Scientist’ by perky youngster Jada (Amani Summer), Vicaria’s story transposes Shelley’s Frankenstein narrative to a marginalised Black estate dogged by working class struggles with drugs and associated crime. Thus Story follows Juel Taylor’s recent effort They Cloned Tyrone in using genre elements to discuss government sanctioned neglect as a form of repression in American society.
Vicaria’s intelligence has to a degree othered her in a microclimate where natural advantage or aptitude is viewed as suspicious or strange and is rarely nurtured. She is, effectively, more privileged than most of her peers. At school she experiences a different othering. The campus is majority white – both faculty and student body alike – and when she challenges the status quo the response is radically and tellingly fearful. Ingratiating herself poorly to Vicaria’s father Donald (Chad L. Coleman), teacher Ms. Kempe (Beth Felice) enquires, “Where are you from?”; an ignorant and clumsy faux pas that most BAME citizens will have experienced at some time. Donald and his daughter are tired of this shit.
Comparable to Michael O’Shea’s more dour 2016 offering The Transfiguration, Story focuses on an isolated Black youth whose extracurricular obsession with subverting mortality leads them to some dark places. O’Shea’s film sought grim solace in the vampire myth; Story’s in the reanimation of the dead. Vicaria has a secret workshop where she aims to resurrect her fallen brother Chris (Edem Atsu-Swanzy). In time honoured tradition, such efforts to undermine death – even unjustified and untimely death – will wreak a havoc of their own. But The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster stares at us squarely and asks what is the natural order of things in a society so rampantly entrenched in racism and infighting? What is right here?
Sometimes the touches are far from subtle, like the cracked lens and taped bridge of Vicaria’s glasses, suggestive of a fragmented or broken psyche; that she is in some way irrevocably damaged from the moment we meet her. Her narration openly suggests as much, but the wider film argues that the blame for this comes from without, not within. That she lives in a society that’s traumatic by design as a method of repression.
The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster clips along on the back of a pacy narrative, propulsive music that skips us through montages, and enough sense from Story to know that he’s working from a known template that doesn’t require handholding. Because we’re familiar with the steps and the tropes we will be quick to acclimatise to them, so Story wastes little time. His presentation is clean and appealing. Vicaria’s neighbourhood is captured in natural light by a camera that roams with grace and fluidity. Once resurrected, ‘Chris’ is a looming, monstrous figure with dreads sprouting from a black hoodie like octopus tentacles. His overtly violent impulses feel like reflex actions; spasms of his violent demise that perpetuate like PTSD, reflecting the cycles of violence presented in the waking, mortal community.
Vicaria’s actions garner the unwelcome attention of local gang leader Kango (Denzel Whitaker), through whom Story observes the frustrating manner in which gang culture promotes Black-on-Black violence. Later, Jada’s mother Aisha (Reilly Brooke Stith) expounds on the need for ideological education in a domestic setting, imploring the youth around her to read Malcolm X over Captain America. A direct dig from Story? Yet if anything Story is showing us through The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster how fantastic storytelling methods can be harnessed to communicate racial truths just as effectively as political texts and manifestos. That such avenues are effective acts of engagement. More relatable and communicative to a passive audience. Still, promoting further reading is to be encouraged!
Kango rhapsodises that the neighbourhood would be different place if clinics and outreach outnumbered police precincts, and he has a point. Within The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster are strong arguments for restructuring the so-called support systems that surround impoverished neighbourhoods. Vicaria’s own method is ultimately just as morally clouded as Kango’s. ‘Chris’ perpetuates the cycle of violence through soulless acts of indiscriminate vengeance, even acting out of impulse against his own. The true solutions – the hardest ones – will entail dedicated systemic overhaul and not phantasmagorical shortcuts.
Performances are strong across the board, but DeLeon Hayes should get the most credit for shouldering a lion’s share of the movie and acting as its emotional anchor. Still, the movie finds its warm heart during a family dinner that sits right at its centre; a precious insight into the sense of love and kinship that Vicaria is trying so hard to sustain. Her motivation. This notion of family and togetherness is routinely skipped over in white depictions of Black relationships, so it is up to filmmakers like Story to redress the balance. He offsets this against ‘Chris’ bludgeoning a white police officer – an act of genuine wish fulfillment for some – before his tale descends fully into anarchic and often tragic violence. Here Story finds a renewed energy and rhythm. The way Vicaria and Kango spit lines venomously at one another is breathless and invigorating.
This is, ultimately, Vicaria’s narrative to resolve alone. Closing a loop of grief and denial, she is propelled toward an inevitable battle with her own ill-conceived creation. Story’s depiction of this is grungily difficult, pocked with staccato strobes and cries of anguish. A birth in reverse. ‘Chris’ perceives himself as a monster, but in a touching rebuke to this – and in spite of everything – Vicaria vigilantly defines him via his familial connections to others. The ways in which he has mattered. The damage done in the process is horrible and heartbreaking, but – in Story’s world – not irreversible. A single rolling tear at the very end of his fable perhaps acknowledges that, in reality, this is never the case.
It falls in mourning for those who can’t resurrect loved ones lost to this epidemic of violence, an epidemic that often seems too rife to quell by any reasonable measure.
The Lost Highway Hotel 