Directed By Coke Daniels

Starring – Taryn Manning, Cory Hardrict, Jasmine Burke

The Plot – A racist woman (Manning) takes it as a personal mission to displace the new black family that just moved into the neighborhood, but they won’t back down without a fight.

This film is currently not rated

Karen Movie Teaser/Trailer – YouTube

POSITIVES

– Maniacal Manning. Taryn is certainly having the time of her life as the titular antagonist, taking her “Orange is the New Black” persona, Pennsawtucky, and turning the volume up to eleven as the worst version of the fun police possible. Part of her approach to Karen thrives on irresponsible ignorance that weaponizes every stereotype and pre-conceived notion by racists accordingly, while maintaining an air of personality that is stuffily suffocating with every interaction she intercepts. However, it’s the subtleties to Manning’s delve that are much appreciated in conveying a deeper understanding of the internal feelings that she illustrates simultaneously with body language and facial reactions, offering a complete picture at the internal vitriol that manifests into something almost supernatural in its level of appalling nature. Manning’s performance is fearlessly invigorating, and cements what is easily the best work of her multiple decades in front of the camera.

– Entertainment value. Whether unintentional or not, “Karen” is a campy good time full of laughably uproarious resiliency and full blown exaggerations in situations that you can’t help but invest in. Part of this appeal pertains to the 84 minute run time and surprisingly smooth pacing that dominates much of the progression of this story, but the value in each scene topping the next in terms of audacity makes the consistency all the more alluring because of what will inevitably materialize next, proving that it’s anything but a one trick pony when it comes to the level of its depiction. Strangely enough, there are better films that I enjoyed less, which makes this one of those trivial anomalies that is classified as being so bad that it’s good, and certainly one deemed worthy of getting together with a few friends and having some drinks at the sheer mayhem of what transpires.

NEGATIVES

– Lack of subtlety. From the opening scene of Karen washing away a chalk mural of a Black Lives Matter artpiece, which serves as only a temporary introduction and nothing more to the storytelling, to the Confederate soap dispenser and various Confederate soldiers adorning her living room walls that a neighboring minority encounters, this movie is about as spontaneously nuanced as a Mack Truck plowing through a gasoline plant, and one as invasively unpleasant and heavy-handed as any movie that I have ever seen. The material emphatically influences these scenes in an impatient haze that wipes away the elements of naturalism or suspense to the way matters materialize in the context of real life, instead making for the cinematic equal to a slap across the face without any of the resonating tingles from its connection.

– Barrel-bottom dialogue. Bad lines are consequential enough to the integrity of any film, but the nonsensical lines in “Karen” ground expectations with such surface level satire that continuously holds your hand through moments of interaction that are anything but natural. Part of the problem is the obviousness of its inclusion, which only echoes sentiments about the characters that we easily interpreted on our own, but the bigger problem pertains to re-reading the definition of the word Karen multiple times to its audience, which is like sitting through an oral dissertation that you’ve already experienced twice before. Some of my favorite lines involve our central black couple saying “I married you because you’re an intelligently black, woke man”, Karen’s best friend saying “He can read me my Miranda Rights any day” in regards to Karen’s cop brother, and a line from Karen so classlessly devised that it feels too hurtful in a movie this stupid, in which she says to her black neighbor “She’s in the kitchen? She’s been slaving away in there”.

– Improper balance. Most of the problem creatively comes from Daniels’ decision to play it both ways, both as a social satire and thrilling race-related drama, which contradict themselves directly, the longer the film persists. Separately, there’s leverage to think that either of these directions would’ve worked cohesively as two completely different projects, but the ridiculousness of the dialogue undercuts the tension in the latter, and the third act stirring conflict removes any semblance of fun from the first two acts, which gravitated its audience in the first place. This obviously leads to a series of abrupt tonal shifts that often feel like two different visionaries are at its helm, leaving the film’s structure disjointed and searching for a collective identity that it unfortunately never finds.

– Hollow characterization. I previously touched on the characters in the movie having a one-dimensional quality to the way they’re dramatically underwritten, and while Karen is the worst of these pawns, she isn’t the only one. This is especially troubling for a B.E.T produced feature as what little we learn about black people can easily be summarized into a couple of sentences, proving that the script is more interested in its white shit-stirrer rather than the people she terrorize. They’re not relatable simply because everything we learn about them is within the confines of the on-the-nose dialogue that vividly paints an obvious picture, and because of such we don’t invest in the tragedy that is unfortunately their daily routine. Aside from them, the police officers providing much of the physical conflict during the movie’s second half are so overtly cartoonish, garnering growls and looks that are easily detectable as pertaining to seething hatred, while further playing into the predictability as a constant in every scene that often underscored my investment.

– Unfinished arc’s. Adding to the problems within the structure of its storytelling is a series of spontaneous one-off sequences and ideas that add about as much to the film as production value does. Such instances involve Karen trying to seduce the male neighbor next door, and it just kind of abruptly goes nowhere without even the slightest bit of pay-off in a confrontation. On top of that, there’s various scattered scenes throughout that space out the narrative in padded ways that not only add nothing of substance to them, but also outlines the titular Karen as an omnipresent villain capable of popping up literally anywhere at any time. These involve her chastisizing a trio of black boys who are literally hanging out nowhere near her property or surrounding neighborhood, a safety surveillance installation of cameras that only serves purpose for the neighbors to discover it, and a couple of scenes of nothing but Karen glaring at the camera to get across her evil demeanor to the audience who apparently haven’t been paying attention to that point.

– General conveniences. Having to overlook logic and go along with matters in this film is like assuming the Seattle Mariners will reach the World Series in this lifetime. I say this because the leaps in logic range anywhere from lackadasical to downright lunacy throughout the film, and make everything so difficult to follow and invest in from the perspective of a person who could be mayor in a town this stupid. Such an example that summarizes everything I hate about these leaps throughout takes place when Karen confronts a restaurant manager about kicking a trio of black friends out of a restaurant for being too loud. It’s ridiculous enough that the restaurant would ask a paying customer to leave in an already loud atmosphere, but I digress. Later, Karen runs into the same guy at their neighbors’ housewarming party. Why Karen would be invited to such a party after raising hell down on them is beyond me, but again, I digress. The bigger assumption is that this guy from the restaurant knows the friends next door, because ya know, all black people know each other. Especially in Atlanta, which is where the film takes place, and is home to a 33.6% black ratio among its citizens. By this point, it beat the Fast and Furious movies in terms of audacity, and crafted a set of sequences and circumstances whose only purpose is getting to the next one as forced and abruptly neurotic as humanly possible.

– Presentational plunders. I clearly saved the best for last, with regards to the complete absence of production value, which made this film standout as the worst kind of student film that money wants no part of. The color grading of grey’s seem intent on painting a colorless justice surrounding the setting, but instead drab the aesthetics with a flat unpleasantness that emits consistency to cheapness to the scale. On top of this, the sound design and overall editing deviates sound levels so extremely between sequences that I often had to keep adjusting the volume levels on my TV, which would elevate and decrease as spontaneously as the various subplots in the film that never evolved into anything substantial. Finally, the shot compositions and depictions in the film attained a dully inconsequential rendering that never prescribed to inspiration, beyond one such sequence where a little white girl and her black neighbor talk in a POV perspective that completely comes out of nowhere, and chooses this of all the moments to immerse audiences in the plight of the predicament. Its intentions are to tug on the heartstrings of being forced to watch a youth come into contact with racism at such an early age, but instead just add to the wet blanket absence of subtlety that like the scene in context, influenced it from such an early age.

My Grade: 2/10 or F-