97 min | R | June 16, 2023 | Lionsgate
Seven Black friends gather at a remote cabin for a reunion weekend. A killer forces them to play a board game built on racist horror tropes, and the first rule is that they have to decide which of them is the blackest. Survival comes down to knowing the genre better than the man trying to murder you.
Seven old college friends reunite at a cabin in the woods for a holiday weekend. They find a board game called The Blackening waiting for them, complete with a racist caricature at its center and a masked killer enforcing the rules. The premise inverts the oldest joke in horror, the one where the Black character dies first. Here the entire cast is Black, so the trope eats itself. The film is a satire about genre literacy as a survival skill, and it is about how a group of people who all know the rules still have to argue about who breaks them.
Dewayne Perkins plays Dewayne with a fast, deadpan wit that anchors the comedy. He delivers exposition about horror cliches as if he resents having to explain them to people who should know better. Antoinette Robertson plays Lisa as the friend everyone treats as the responsible one, and Robertson lets the strain of that role show. Grace Byers plays Allison with a sharpness that cuts through the panic around her. Melvin Gregg gives King a swagger that the script keeps puncturing, and Jermaine Fowler plays Clifton with a clueless eagerness that the group rightly distrusts. The ensemble works because the friendships feel old and the insults feel earned.
Tim Story directs from a script by Tracy Oliver and Dewayne Perkins, who adapt their own comedy sketch into a feature. Story shoots the cabin with the deliberate flatness of a Friday the 13th set, all wood paneling and dim lamps, so the visual language signals the genre the characters keep naming out loud. The game room scene plays as the centerpiece, lit like an interrogation, and Story holds the camera on the board long enough to let the joke curdle into menace. The editing favors the rhythm of the dialogue over the rhythm of the kills. That choice tells you the film cares more about the argument than the body count.
This is a comedy first and a slasher second, and the film knows exactly which it is doing better. The satire is sharp when it targets the genre itself and the assumptions baked into who gets to be the final survivor. The horror mechanics are functional but never frightening, and the tension drains whenever the jokes stop. The film succeeds because it trusts its cast to talk, and because it understands that the trope it is mocking was always a lie about who matters in a story.