Alice (2022)
Directed by Krystin Ver Linden
Alice spends her days enslaved on a rural Georgia plantation, restlessly yearning for freedom. After a violent clash with plantation owner Paul, Alice flees through the neighboring woods and stumbles onto the unfamiliar sight of a highway, soon discovering the year is actually 1973.
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Pair that with the inspiration of Pam Grier in Coffy , plus the encouragement of truck driver and one-time activist Frank (Common) – who nearly ran her down as she escaped to the highway – and Alice is ready to return for her family and some tasty revenge.
The events that the movie says it is inspired by reportedly date back to the 1960s, but Ver Linden pushes the clock forward to the Blaxploitation era so that she can achieve her fait accompli: After reading a stack of encyclopedias provided by her savior and sidekick, Frank (Common), and taking marching orders from Pam Grier in “Coffy,” Alice morphs into an Afro-sporting Black Power heroine ready to free her kin back on the plantation and exact revenge on her white captors.
Next, a screening of the film Coffy (plus an eye rolling television montage of pertinent images through Common’s god-like channel changing) suggest Alice aims for an entirely different energy, but Linden drops the ball on subtext.
Grier’s inimitable Coffy, which Frank takes her to see, provides Alice — both film and character —with a hefty dose of vengeful inspiration.
Nevertheless, it’s less than 24 before she’s discovered Pam Grier, dosed herself with Coffy at the cinema and given herself a full makeover in the mould of her new heroine.
She even watches “Coffy” for motivation, staring up at Pam Grier with the awe of seeing her inner goddess strut the earth, and somehow, within two days of her escape, finds a pair of perfectly fitting leather pants just in time for the climax.
Instead, we are simply teleported on the other side, with a few historical footage reminders to help us along and a sequence of clips from Foxy Brown to confirm Alice coming into her own.
In the span of just two days, Alice transforms from meek and confused to a sartorial and emotional simulacra of Foxy Brown-era Pam Grier.
That quote definitely begins with M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village and segues into something like 1999’s Blast From the Past before ending with, say Foxy Brown (Coffy would be a little too on the nose).
This is no spoiler; Alice is not an exercise in Shyamalan-esque twists (although the premise recalls his 2004 drama The Village ), but an explosive study of the true meaning of freedom and the ownership of one’s own fate.
In the past, thrillers such as "Antebellum" and M. Night Shyamalan's "The Village" have used that timeframe gotcha as an endpoint.
You can also ask yourself why a plantation set in the 1970s has never modernised in any way, shape or form, either to tease a big twist reveal a la The Village , that the film never even promises.
Suffice it to say that if you’ve seen M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village , you won’t be entirely surprised by the script’s big twist.
There’s a touch of “The Handmaid’s Tale” and a bit of “The Village” evident in “Alice,” a revenge thriller with an unusual premise.
An assistant to Quentin Tarantino on “Inglorious Basterds” and “Django Unchained,” Linden somewhat borrows from the latter film in “Alice,” whereby the title character discovers some catharsis by returning to her former plantation.
(In interviews, she’s called Quentin Tarantino her “mentor,” and that’s evident in the film’s nods to “Django Unchained” and “Jackie Brown.”)
Its director, Krystin Ver Linden, learned about screenwriting and directing partly from the years she spent working for Quentin Tarantino, acting as an assistant on multiple films, including Django Unchained and Inglourious Basterds .
The desire to reclaim this sort of narrative for a liberational feature is interesting––an idea used a decade ago in the revisionist history playground of Django Unchained , a film made during the seven years in which Ver Linden worked assisting Quentin Tarantino.
Alice essentially becomes Antebellum meets Django Unchained, adding to the recent slate of “secret slavery” thrillers.
Tarantino does a similar sort of trick in "Django Unchained," but he's a brilliant subverter of existing genres, a skill, at this point, the callow Ver Linden does not appear to have on offer.
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Ver Linden’s film makes use of this horrific concept in an attempt to recapture themes and aesthetics of Blaxploitation-era revenge movies like Cleopatra Jones and Coffy (the latter factors significantly in the plot).
The semi-serious introduction of 1970s Black American popular culture adds another level to the story, making public figures such as Angela Davis, and female-led action films of the day, from Coffey to Cleopatra Jones , both part of the story and a running commentary, in a highly entertaining way.
It is a theme familiar from other recent productions, especially the 2020 horror film Antebellum , but Alice takes a slightly different approach.
There’s no avoiding comparisons to Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz’s 2020 film Antebellum.
When the trailer for writer-director Krystin Ver Linden’s debut feature Alice dropped the other month, audiences were quick to draw easy comparisons to 2020′s absolute failure of a horror film, Antebellum.
Considering the recent discovery of a contemporary migrant slave plantation at the end of 2021, not to mention the resonance of this material with 2020’s searing horror thriller Antebellum , this was Linden’s game to lose.
Because of a certain twist in the movie’s awful plot, “Alice” is going to get inevitable comparisons to the 2020 horror misfire “Antebellum.”
The Keke Palmer enslaved woman’s revenge thriller “Alice” went into production as Lionsgate’s Janelle Monáe vehicle, “Antebellum” announced its release date back in 2020.
(In interviews, she’s called Quentin Tarantino her “mentor,” and that’s evident in the film’s nods to “Django Unchained” and “Jackie Brown.”)
No psychotic plantation owner will ever live up to the unfathomable evil of Michael Fassbender’s Edwin Epps in 12 Years a Slave .
More Mandingo than 12 Years a Slave , this blunt depiction of presumably pre-Civil War horrors is not quite what it seems, however.
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This story deserved better than the Black version of Encino Man .
Its director, Krystin Ver Linden, learned about screenwriting and directing partly from the years she spent working for Quentin Tarantino, acting as an assistant on multiple films, including Django Unchained and Inglourious Basterds .