Emergency, 2022.
Directed by Carey Williams.
Starring RJ Cyler, Donald Elise Watkins, Sebastian Chacon, Maddie Nichols, Madison Thompson, and Sabrina Carpenter.
SYNOPSIS:
Ready for a night of legendary partying, three college students must weigh the pros and cons of calling the police when faced with an unexpected situation.
Carey Williams follows up his middling debut R#J – which premiered at last year’s Sundance – with an altogether more confident and propulsive sophomore feature, that mines its just-believable-enough premise for both perverse humour and crushing truth.
Kunle (Donald Elise Watkins) and his best pal Sean (RJ Cyler) are two Black thesis students attending the predominantly white Buchanan University. They’ve got one hell of a night planned, hoping to become Buchanan’s first Black students to complete the Legendary Tour, a travelogue of seven different frat parties over the course of one evening.
However, a quick trip home throws their plans for a loop, when they find the door ajar and discover a young white girl, Emma (Maddie Nichols), unconscious in their living room. With an understandable lack of faith in society to believe the innocence of their story, Kunle, Sean, and their Latino roommate Carlos (Sebastian Chacon) debate how to resolve the situation.
Emergency certainly doesn’t offer a subtle treatment of its subject matter, filtered instead through the gonzo lens of alcohol-sodden comedies like The World’s End and Superbad, yet with the distinct difference of its subjects’ non-whiteness. Even before a drunk white girl thoroughly ruins their evening, though, KD Davila’s script lays the foundations of Kunle and Sean’s place as outsiders in a mostly-white college.
In class, a professor lecturing about language seems to relish using the “n-word” couched within the apparent safety of academic context. Elsewhere, the school’s patronising white liberalism extends to a “Hall of Firsts” intended to commemorate even the most mundane of Black accomplishments (which has quite the amusing payoff in a mid-credits tag).
The clear pressure on the pair to both “behave well” and succeed is orders of magnitude larger than for any white person, serving as a launch-pad for the twisted situation they’re caught in. Three college students finding an unconscious woman in their home would be dubious enough even if the guys were white, but with the trio being persons of colour – two of the three being Black, moreover – the implications unfortunately become incredibly dangerous.
The crux of the issue is that summoning help for this possibly-roofied girl will bring a ton of unwanted police attention upon them – as Sean says, “We don’t have to do anything, just be at the wrong place at the wrong time.” And so, much of the first act is devoted to the three exploring how to deal with the situation in a way that would be acceptable to popular (that is, predominantly white) society. Tellingly, their first port of call is to raid the straight-laced Kunle’s wardrobe for clothing that looks less “threatening” to whites.
The inevitability of Emma waking up and wondering what happened presents a most unique ticking clock for our embattled protagonists, not to mention that Kunle desperately needs to return to the science lab to check on bacteria cultures which may have been improperly stored. If the cultures are ruined, it could affect his conditional acceptance to a grad program at Princeton University.
This setup lays the groundwork for a thriller as uneasily tense as it is darkly funny, bouncing from one precarious scenario to the next as the lads try to find a way to get Emma to safety without comprising their own. If the structure lifts liberally from the formula of the high-school coming-of-age comedy, the stakes are of course much higher, and because that danger feels so real throughout it’s in no way certain the situation will end well for our unwilling heroes.
Emergency soars when focused on the elegantly frantic central situation, though bloats itself out somewhat by introducing a white perspective through Emma’s sister Maddie (Sabrina Carpenter) and her two pals. The storytelling intent is clear, to further underline the fearful conclusions which even alleged white allies may jump to, but ultimately the caricature of white fear feels a little overdone. The brief moment where the boys encounter a “Karen” recording them on their phone, only for her to return to her home with a Black Lives Matter placard on the lawn, hammers the point home far more effectively (and hilariously).
For the most part, though, the complications are compellingly piled on – especially one queasy mid-film revelation – to keep our concern for their welfare high. Less-urgently, a small subplot shades of Superbad sees Kunle struggling to tell Sean that he’s been accepted to Princeton and won’t be able to live with him next year.
All in all this may not be massively sophisticated as satire but it is bluntly effective and mines its broad targets for honest, cutting laughs. The epilogue is over-extended, yet effectively shifts away from the comedic outlay to unpack Black trauma in a poignant way – and how white people inevitably try to make it all about them.
This is a stylish, well-made film that’s a considerable step-up for director Williams, though Davila’s script and especially the three central performances are truly what make it sing. The dynamic between Watkins’ Kunle and Cyler’s Sean is both funny and affecting, with Watkins in particular encapsulating the enormous weight placed upon Black men in society.
A social satire as painfully true as it is stingingly funny, Emergency pointedly indicts the handicap society places against Black existence.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
Shaun Munro – Follow me on Twitter for more film rambling.
