Let me be up front: I’m going to spoil Krystin Ver Linden’s 2022 thriller Alice. You can’t not. The trailer spoils the film’s core twist, so I don’t feel too bad, but if you want to go in unspoiled, consider this your warning. Well, okay, consider this your warning: Save your time. There are definitely more intriguing films to give your time to.
1
Alice (Keke Palmer) is an enslaved woman living in what appears to be Antebellum Georgia. There she, alongside her secret husband Joseph (Gaius Charles) and family, toils every day for a ruthless slave owner, Paul (Johnny Lee Miller). She’s pushed to the breaking point when her husband attempts to escape, only to be gunned down. She flees.
What she finds in the world outside the plantation shocks her. A friendly trucker named Franklin (Common) narrowly avoids hitting her, as she wanders into the middle of a busy freeway. Instead, Franklin picks her up and drives her to a hospital, concerned that she may have amnesia but surprisingly unconcerned about the blood staining her dress. He fills her in as they drive, letting her know that it’s the 1970s, and saving her from a forced stay at a psych ward.
Taking her under his wing, Franklin teaches Alice about the modern world. She picks up quickly. Stunned by the sheer number of Black faces she sees on magazines, on the television, just out living their lives, she quickly realizes the horrible truth: She was lied to. She was raised an enslaved person in an era of the Civil Rights movement, and never knew anything else.
Alice won’t let that happen to anyone else. She plans to free her family from Paul, and hopefully get some revenge while she’s at it.
2
Here’s the thing: The first 35-40 minutes of this film are all set on Paul’s plantation. It features all the grueling horrors inflicted upon Black people we’ve come to expect from filmed slave narratives. The violence and degradation of that first third of the film aren’t even particularly extreme by the standards of the genre, but they’re almost worse: They’re pointless.
See, if you’ve read a one-line synopsis of the film, you know that she’s going to escape and it’s the 1970s. If you’ve seen the trailer, you know that she escapes into the 1970s. Hell, the film foregrounds the twist, having people find a modern lighter or reading books that didn’t yet exist in the 1800s. It fully expects you to know what’s going on here. And yet, still, the film insists on wallowing in that pain.
Contrast this with Alice when she gets out. We have the requisite culture shock, as someone acclimates to a culture completely foreign to themselves. That’s a potentially interesting story. We have her relationship with Franklin, a former radical Black Panther settling into a miserable life of capitalist exploitation. There’s something there. And we have Alice herself, discovering the efflorescence of Black art, Black culture, Black thought that defined the 1960s and 1970s.
And that is a fucking story. An enslaved person going from having no real philosophy of resistance to learning about Angela Davis and Malcolm X? Using that as an impetus to fight injustice? Hell yeah! That’s powerful, emotional stuff. That’s the kind of thing movies never give us: Black joy, community, empowerment.
So why is it relegated mostly to a montage?
3
Alice isn’t terrible. Keke Palmer is excellent. There’s some really great prop work and costuming here. And I’m intrigued by the (admittedly disparate) threads that do manage to tie together white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism, the bell hooks trifecta. Fleshed out, this could have been a rich, vibrant film, without needing to change all that much to its basic structure.
Unfortunately, first-time director Krystin Ver Linden mostly takes the easy way out. The slavery scenes call to mind a budget 12 Years a Slave. The big revenge sequence is, as with most exploitation films, quick and simple. There are rich conflicts here and some excellent performances, but the movie doesn’t draw them out.
So Alice isn’t bad, sure. It’s just disappointing.