Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has launched any number of adaptations, variations, and permutations in the 205 years since it was first published. The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster, a modern-day riff on the story, may be one of the more touching — up to a point. A first feature by writer-director Bomani J. Story, ABG&HM is bound to be derided as “woke” by a certain contingent, though none of the Black characters in it is especially heroic or faultless, least of all Vicaria (Laya DeLeon Hayes), a student at an advanced high school.
Vicaria rattles off elements and scientific facts, and Hayes lets us share how good it feels to Vicaria to be in control of something. Her home life is gutted though (barely) functional, her neighborhood is infested with crack dealers and the resulting violence, and the (white) authority figures who enforce the rules in school and on the streets won’t help her. I believed very quickly and completely in Vicaria as a brilliant girl who may also be missing a few pieces psychologically.
Vicaria’s mother was shot to death years ago, leaving behind Vicaria and her father (Chad L. Coleman), who buys crack from the cold-blooded local dealer (Denzel Whitaker) when he’s not working two jobs. The movie is matter-of-fact about the misery it shows us, and is also willing to sketch in some genuine warmth between family. The portrait of a bleeding community feels full and lived. To complicate things, Vicaria’s brother Chris (Edem Atsu-Swanzy) has recently been killed by the cops. Vicaria steals his body — not the first corpse she’s squirreled away, we learn — and decides to test her theory that death is a disease and can be cured.
This angry Black girl’s monster isn’t just the re-animated Chris; it’s rage itself, which Chris seems possessed by, and by the need to act it out. Fury flows through the monster’s veins as much as the electricity Vicaria uses to jump-start him. (When he strangles people, he leaves deep, ugly burn marks on their flesh.) Bomani J. Story uses Frankenstein to tell a tale about how anger and desperation can napalm the innocent and guilty alike. Chris wreaks havoc on cops and criminals — destroying the world that destroyed him — and we get the impression he’s acting as much on Vicaria’s wishes as his own. Her name probably sounds like “vicarious” for a reason.
ABG&HM is a fine, wounding drama that occasionally puts on a Halloween costume and gets its hands gory. It’s a hell of a calling card, and Story can take a bow for the seeming effortlessness with which he juggles thematic concerns and sustains an oppressive tone usually in exciting conflict with the snappy filmmaking. But the movie doesn’t hit us as deeply as it might, and it’s easy to see why: We never get to know Chris as a living person — he’s dead right from the start, and the artsy, wordless flashbacks we get of him don’t help. Story may have needed to keep the film to a certain length, and scenes of Chris and Vicaria sharing warm moments may have been sacrificed. So there’s no contrast between whatever he was before and the growling, haltingly spoken monster he becomes.
Chris’s own family, even including Vicaria, doesn’t seem to have much of an emotional response to his recent death, either (and nobody goes looking for his body, which it’s assumed that someone “sick” made off with) — not even Aisha (Reilly Brooke Stith), who’s carrying Chris’s baby. They all get together for a family dinner that, as I noted above, is a welcome respite from the grimness — but shouldn’t they show a bit more consciousness of who isn’t at the table? (Chris is mentioned a couple times.) I know, I know, Story has more on his plate than grief and its realistic impact; an entire movie could be made (and has been) about processing all the intense, tangled emotions following a loved one’s violent death. Here, Chris’s death isn’t the subject, it’s a delivery system for a premise, and we sort of need to agree to go along with that to get the most out of the film. It’s not perfect, but it leaves me wanting to see more from this filmmaker. It gets our interest and holds it.