At the helm of Bomani J. Story’s feature directing debut, somewhat deceptively titled “The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster,” is the young Vicaria (Laya DeLeon Hayes), a sharp-witted teenager mired in grief. Routine gun violence has snatched the lives of her mother and Chris, her older brother (Edem Atsu-Swanzy), while her father, Donald (Chad Coleman) — woeful collateral — recovers from drug addiction in the wake of their deaths.
Vicaria’s genius inspires the neighborhood kids to christen her “mad scientist” and later, “body snatcher,” for she labors under the conviction that “death is a disease.” In the dim light of a cluttered storage unit, she stoops over her brother’s lifeless body — sewing bloody flesh together — determined to coax him back from the dead.
Fitting that Story should make his first feature a rendition of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel “Frankenstein,” a famously fluid text that refuses classical genre divisions: It has all at once been deemed science fiction, gothic horror and women’s fiction. But Shelley’s monster always possessed a racial dimension that only a smattering of scholars have dared to confront. Consider the hardly clandestine, popular imagery of the Black Other lurking in the monster’s description: his staggering frame, destructive strength, and the ever-present threat of sexual deviance. Predictably perhaps; the novel arrived in the throes of the antislavery debate, after the nominal end of the international slave trade and amid ongoing revolts in the United States and the Caribbean.
The struggle, then, of cinema that concerns itself in any material way with the social conditions of Black life, is that it must account, too, for mass death. But fixing horror in the Black body is a tricky business, and “The Angry Black Girl” stumbles in the same way its ancestor, “Candyman” (1992), did. Fundamentally, Vicaria and her neighbors are terrorized by a freakish Black man: what glimpses we catch of his bloated fingers and disfigured face transform him into a fearsome predator. It is difficult to challenge the character’s monstrousness when we know so little about Chris, the man.
The film invokes Emmett Till, clumsily at that, in a tale that principally concerns itself with community violence (a phenomenon hardly exclusive to Black people). When Mamie Till displayed her son’s mangled body for the public, it was because she wanted to reflect the monstrosity of the people (and the nation that widely sanctioned it) who could do such violence to a child. “The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster” struggles to manage the same complexity, despite compelling performances from Hayes and Coleman.
The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms.
