Emer­gency

Two friends on the verge of grad­u­a­tion make a dec­la­ra­tion: they’re gonna make it onto ​‘the wall’. More specif­i­cal­ly, the Black Stu­dent Union’s wall of fame, where the achieve­ments of black stu­dents who were the first to attain some­thing are memo­ri­alised for future gen­er­a­tions. They’re gonna have fun with it, though, and cel­e­brate the end of their stud­ies by being the first stu­dents to attend all sev­en major col­lege par­ties in a sin­gle night.

Yet when Kun­le (Don­ald Elise Watkins) and Sean (RJ Cyler) return to their place to pre­pare for the par­ties, there’s a prob­lem: a white girl is roofied and uncon­scious in their liv­ing room. Do they call the cops? They’ve done noth­ing wrong. But as we’ve seen more and more often in recent years, doing noth­ing wrong doesn’t mean any­thing when you’re a black per­son inter­act­ing with police.

Fresh off a screen­writ­ing award at Sun­dance Film Fes­ti­val comes Emer­gency, a com­e­dy tack­ling par­ty cul­ture and police racism direct­ed by Carey Williams, using light-heart­ed absur­di­ty to empha­sise how entrenched racial divides impact our expe­ri­ences by tak­ing them to the extreme. A sit­u­a­tion where three guys spend an entire night dri­ving a passed-out white girl in their car to avoid con­fronta­tion, only to make their sit­u­a­tion worse, seems ludi­crous until you realise how pos­si­ble it is, and how dan­ger­ous this sit­u­a­tion could be.

As the stakes keep ris­ing, humour is per­haps the only way to come to terms with the dan­ger at hand. The stress brings dif­fer­ing opin­ions and con­fronta­tion to the fore at its most seri­ous in the lat­ter half, but it’s hard to dis­agree with any view when no mat­ter what, help­ing this vic­tim could make them vic­tims themselves.

This inter­nal con­flict between doing what’s nec­es­sary with the deck stacked against them dri­ves this social­ly-rel­e­vant com­e­dy-thriller, but it does often feel unfo­cused in its uncer­tain­ty on where to take the hang­ing threads of its cen­tral con­flict. The two par­ty plan­ners ini­tial­ly plan to par­ty with­out their room­mate Car­los (Sebas­t­ian Cha­con) who joins them in help­ing Emma (Mad­die Nichols), but his inclu­sion offer­ing a dif­fer­ent Mex­i­can-Amer­i­can per­spec­tive on the sit­u­a­tion often feels sim­i­lar­ly like an afterthought.

Ideas that com­pli­cate the vary­ing opin­ions on what to do next are often left unre­solved too. We’re remind­ed of Kunle’s hon­our stu­dent sta­tus often, yet this inter­est­ing thread of how the soci­etal call to be the ​‘mod­el Black per­son’ doesn’t avoid police con­flict is reit­er­at­ed but nev­er explored in any depth.

Still, it’s hard not to appre­ci­ate how effort­less­ly every joke of Emer­gency is under­lin­ing the stark mes­sage of sys­temic racism under­pin­ning its real­i­ty, only made more grave by the antag­o­nis­tic white force over­shad­ow­ing their efforts to do the right thing in an uncon­ven­tion­al way.

Any flaws the film has in its pac­ing make it no less of an essen­tial view­ing expe­ri­ence, with an air of unpre­dictabil­i­ty in its final act and enough to say to stick with you after the cred­its roll. They may not have their par­ty night, but it’s not one they’ll for­get any time soon, either.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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