86 min | PG-13 | October 2, 2020 | Netflix
Three Bronx kids notice their neighborhood vanishing one bodega at a time. The new buyers smile too much, avoid daylight, and want everyone out. Turns out gentrification has teeth.
Three kids in the Bronx notice their neighborhood disappearing. Storefronts close and longtime residents vanish. A real estate firm called Murnau Properties buys up the block and sends a smiling representative to smooth the transition. The buyers are literal vampires, and the film treats gentrification as the predation it already resembles. Oz Rodríguez builds a horror-comedy where the monster and the metaphor are the same thing.
Jaden Michael plays Miguel Martinez, the self-appointed organizer who calls himself Lil’ Mayor and fights to save the corner bodega. Michael gives him earnest civic energy without making him a scold. Gregory Diaz IV plays Luis Acosta as the horror obsessive who recognizes the vampire signs because he has seen the movies. Gerald W. Jones III plays Bobby Carter as the friend drifting toward the local crew, and Jones makes the pull feel like exhaustion rather than menace. Sarah Gadon plays Vivian with a real-estate-agent warmth that curdles the moment the sun goes down. Method Man plays Father Jackson, and Shea Whigham plays the developer Frank Polidori with the dead calm of a man who has done this before.
Rodríguez directs from a script he wrote with Blaise Hemingway, and the two keep the scares grounded in recognizable space. The horror plays out in apartment stairwells, on fire escapes, and inside the bodega rather than on an abstract gothic set. The production design does the thematic work without a speech. A renovated storefront and an artisanal coffee shop read as the same warning as a coffin. The vampires burn in daylight, which forces the film to stage its danger in the ordinary geography of a working block at night. The pacing stays tight and never lets the joke smother the threat.
The metaphor is not subtle, and the film knows it and does not care. It earns the bluntness by keeping the kids specific and the neighborhood specific. Miguel and his friends are protecting a place with names and faces, not an abstraction. Rodríguez understands that the most effective monster movies are about something real, and here the real thing is people getting pushed out so the block can be sold to someone richer. The comedy keeps it from turning into a lecture. The horror keeps it from turning into a joke.