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Red Pill (2021)
Somewhere you never expected to be
Tonya Pinkins' horror-film/reality show RED PILL will take you somewhere you never expected to be, but of course you have been there already. And as you watch, something keeps tugging at you, "Don't go there, don't go there!" but it's only a movie, so maybe you can have a few screams and then it's over. Or not.
The movie opens with a glimpse of terror that primes you dreadfully, but it then proceeds to be what a comfortable group of friends treat, at first as a socially conscientious vote-canvassing outing into rural Virginia mere days before the 2020 presidential election. They have rented a house that of course becomes the scene of their hideous demise.
The unexpected: One of them is... a "red pill," explained by Pinkins' character, Cassandra, thus: "Somebody who infiltrates a group in order to destroy it from within."
Foreboding makes itself visible in fits and starts as the tension builds; the viewer knows this cannot end well. Cassandra (a worldly Black woman) leads the group in identifying the fear at every step, but they good-naturedly reassure her to relax; they are safe, jovial friends on a woke mission, after all. "Wherever you go, that's where you are," her friend Rocky (Rubén Blades) advises. But that is the problem!
The scariest thing about this movie is also the most familiar, the most normal, mundane, and the most undeniable: for a Black woman, the monster hides in plain sight and even mocks you. And until the first actual murder takes place ("What's HAPPENING?" rings out from one of the trapped cohort) the juxtaposition of ordinary everyday life and inexorable looming unimaginable terror presents the actual atmosphere of the white world that African Americans must navigate in the 21st Century. The barbecue grill is always stored in the barn... right next to the noose.
With a rare artistry for horror films, Pinkins has evoked a world where you must laugh as the chains rattle. The movie has its full complement of bone-shaking screams and gasps of agony but as the characters scramble, shriek and cower as they try to evade their grim fate, you can also feel a full-throated resistance to the inevitable monstrosity: yes, this is where we live, and we do live, so long as we can.
I always watch movies with the goal of figuring out the ending well before it becomes manifest. I had to give up on that, this time. If you are Black in America, or if you live in and care about America, take a deep breath and watch RED PILL, at least once. (For me, it took more than one viewing.) Although the truth will not set you free, it will appear in big red letters.