A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

Alice was my least-favorite of the four movies I saw at virtual Sundance. It wasn't bad, but was more of an ambitious mess.

Alice (Keke Palmer) lives on a slave plantation in the 1800s. About a third of the way into the movie, she escapes, and...

...almost gets run over by a truck! She's not living in the 1800s, she's in 1973. The plantation pretended it was the 1800s to prevent the slaves from trying to escape.

Luckily, the truck driver was an extremely nice Black guy, Frank (Common), who invites her to stay at his apartment and provides her with TV and newspapers. In literally a single afternoon, she catches up on over 100 years of history and pop culture. Within a week, she's got a fabulous new look and hairdo, and is going out to the movies with Common. And she's also planning to rescue the slaves back at the plantation...

This movie is based on a true story, which unsurprisingly has literally nothing in common with the movie other than that it's about Black people being enslaved and deliberately kept ignorant of their rights in the modern day. The real story is much more depressing and, well, realistic; it's the kind of labor trafficking that still happens to this day.

The first part of the movie, the part on the plantation, is basically realistic in tone. The second part is not. As a whole, it felt like two movies stuck together without enough to bridge the gap between a Room-like naturalistic depiction of a woman brought up in slavery and a blaxsploitation revenge fantasy. They're both done well, looked at separately, but juxtaposed together, neither makes a whole lot of sense.

The whole middle part, I kept getting hung up on things like how Alice could possibly figure out how to call people based on Frank's totally inadequate explanation of what a phone was, why she completely stops having culture shock after basically one day, and everything about the plantation.

If it was a slave town that decided to hide the news of the Civil War (HOW) and the Emancipation Proclamation from the slaves, that makes sense but why not modernize in other ways? There's nothing inherent about electricity or modern dress that would give the game away, so why are they basically living in an Antebellum re-enactment? Or is the whole thing a cult idolizing the past? Is the entire town in on it? If not, how have they not noticed what's going on given the way everyone dresses?

This movie would have worked better either as realism or as satire/fantasy. But it needed to pick one and stick to it.

Alice at Amazon.