There’s something seductively potent about the slick yet artful packaging of Queen & Slim, a film arriving with all the confidence of a self-appointed classic. There’s the stylised marketing, the hip, star-packed soundtrack (Lauryn Hill singing again!), the Beyoncé-approved first-time director, the in-demand lead actor post-Oscar nomination, the Emmy-winning writer turned mogul and the logline that’s both tantalising and timely. It also remains rare, and refreshing, to see a studio-backed film boasting a wealth of black talent telling a black story and given a prime Thanksgiving release date, aiming for both box office and awards glory.
Lofty expectations are therefore inevitable and while there’s definite magnetism here, there’s not quite enough of it to warrant the hype, a sterling attempt that’s missing a few vital ingredients. One thing it’s not missing is a killer setup, throwing us in the middle of what’s turning out to be a rather forgettable first date between an unnamed man (Daniel Kaluuya) and woman (Jodie Turner-Smith). She’s bored, he’s eager and there’s an unspoken awareness that this will also be their last date. But fate has other ideas and as he drives her home, a vicious white cop pulls them over and in a horribly well-orchestrated chain of events, the man ends up killing him in self-defence. Aware of the optics, the two flee and as they try to outrun the authorities, they start to find out that there’s more between them than they initially realised.
Already crudely dubbed the black Bonnie & Clyde (a character in the film also refers to the couple as this) and understandably compared to Thelma and Louise, co-writer Lena Waithe has suggested that 1996’s criminally underrated all-female bank robbers thriller Set It Off is a more apt comparison. Unlike Arthur Penn’s 1967 game-changer, the pair are forced into violence by unavoidable circumstance and horrified by what they have to do in order to survive, a bleak penalty for being black in America. It’s a far slower and more meditative film than Set It Off too, a lovers on the run thriller with frequent detours and, ultimately, a far less urgent and effective one.
For the first act, it mostly flies, the horror of the altercation reverberating effectively and having enjoyed director Melina Matsoukas’s many impressive music videos and distinctive work on Issa Rae’s excellent HBO series Insecure, it’s a pleasure to see her aesthetic transferred so successfully to the big screen. Together with the British cinematographer Tat Radcliffe, she soaks Queen & Slim in atmosphere, capturing a rarely viewed backroads vision of America, the kind of which we’re used to seeing in a photo essay rather than on film. The visuals are also matched with an exquisite score from Dev Hynes AKA Blood Orange and a stellar soundtrack and Matsoukas, as already shown in Insecure, is able to pair just the right piece of music with just the right image, and as a result, there’s a smattering of moments that feel transcendent. If nothing else, it’s a fantastic showcase for her abilities.
But it’s in the script, written by Waithe based on a story by, bizarrely, the disgraced author James Frey, that problems seep in. After involving us in their horrifying predicament, the film has difficulty sustaining our investment. There is an interesting update of the oft-told on the lam formula, with the pair’s blackness either helping or hindering them further depending on where they are and who they’re confronted with, and there’s a heated debate in both the media and in person as to whether their actions were justified (spoiler: they were) but the script struggles to bridge the link between the central duo and the rising tensions around the country as a result. There is one well-staged and initially poignant protest scene but it ends in a far-fetched, and unearned, act of melodrama that doesn’t land with the intended impact.
As the story enters the final act, with danger on the rise, the uneasy machinations of the plot mean that the pair start indulging in some particularly baffling, dim-witted decision-making to lead them from one setpiece to the next, the kind that led to audible sighing in the press screening I was in. A smoother script wouldn’t have had us questioning quite as much. A smoother script would also have made their transition from spiky, ill-matched strangers to ride-or-die lovers a little more believable but it’s hard to buy them not only as a couple but as a couple who the film pushes as an iconic example of woozy, all-consuming love. This is also down to a lack of palpable, electric chemistry, a major problem in a film so inherently reliant on it.
Kaluuya, going from breakout final guy in Get Out to the menacing MVP of Widows, is on superb form here and makes for a charismatic romantic lead but newcomer, model Turner-Smith in her first major big screen role, is frustratingly vacant. She’s underplaying, which works to an extent given her character’s self-confessed loneliness, but that mode becomes rather one-note and she never convinces as someone going through a traumatic, life-changing and ultimately romantic experience. The journey takes them from vignette to vignette, meeting actors such as Chloë Sevigny, Flea, Indya Moore and Bokeem Woodbine along the way, but none of the interludes truly linger, each fading fast in the rearview mirror.
There’s ambition and tenacity to spare in Queen & Slim, a film that presents itself as an almighty event, something to be rewatched, retweeted about and remembered for years to come. It’s tempting to fall for, thanks to impeccable work from Matsoukas and Kaluuya, but by the end, for a film so focused on love, I wanted to feel a bit more of it.
Queen & Slim is released in the US on 27 November and in the UK on 31 January
