Sundance Film Festival: Keke Palmer is the best part of the flawed Alice

Keke Palmer in Alice. // Courtesy of Sundance Institute. Photo by Kyle Kaplan

The most shocking part of Krystin Ver Linden’s Alice is its assertion that it’s based on a true story. Considering the movie’s content—the main character is an enslaved person who escapes a Georgia plantation only to discover the year is actually 1973—you’d be right to be stunned, and doubtful.

Believe it or not, while Ver Linden’s movie is highly fictionalized, it’s inspired by accounts of peonage. The illegal form of slavery kept Black people, in some isolated cases, enslaved in parts of the south into the 1960s. 

Ver Linden’s film makes use of this horrific concept in an attempt to recapture themes and aesthetics of Blaxploitation-era revenge movies like Cleopatra Jones and Coffy (the latter factors significantly in the plot). It falls short of that goal for a few reasons but manages to squeak by thanks to a committed performance from its star, Keke Palmer.

Palmer’s Alice and her family are victims of a cruel, deranged plantation owner (Jonny Lee Miller), in a setting that leads them to believe it’s the 1800s.

After Alice’s husband (Gaius Charles) is presumably beaten to death following an escape attempt, Alice hits her breaking point and runs away and races through the woods until she hits a highway, to her bewildered terror. It’s actually the early ’70s, and legally, Alice and her family have actually been free their entire lives.

Fortunately, the first person who sees Alice is a kindly truck driver and former Black Panther named Frank (Common), who takes her in. As Alice adjusts to her new reality, discovering liberation and empowerment along the way through the examples of Pam Grier and Diana Ross, she becomes focused on liberating her family, and getting revenge on the monsters who made their lives a living hell. 

It all sounds disconcertingly similar to Antebellum, last year’s horror movie in which kidnapped contemporary Black people were forced into a sadistic, racist role-playing scenario.

Alice avoids some of Antebellum’s pitfalls, but not all. By focusing on Alice’s recovery and empowerment, the film allows Palmer’s character to become a hero rather than a victim. It depicts and acknowledges brutality, but doesn’t linger on it.

Palmer’s performance as a woman out of time feels credible, even if her swift transition to the badass angel of vengeance doesn’t quite. Her screams of frustration and anguish, overwhelmed, processing expressions, and eventual confidence all feel earned. 

Common, on the other hand, hits like a sack of potatoes, with little to no emotional journey. 

Plenty has been written about whether or not this particular issue speaks to Common’s problems as a performer. Regardless of where you fall on that, just as much of the problem is due to the script. 

Frank becomes Alice’s reluctant ally, having experienced some unnamed past trauma as an activist that caused him to drop out of the movement. Rather than make him empowered but dormant, Ver Linden neuters the character to an unbelievable degree.

Even after he learns Alice’s story, Frank is unsure if he can help her carry out justice, as if any sympathetic person, much less an ex-Black Panther, wouldn’t be screaming that knowledge at the top of their lungs the second they learned it to anyone within hearing range.

Alice touches on worthwhile concepts, with a love of the genre that’s also apparent in how it treats its female lead. However, none of it feels fully baked.

What does work here is thanks completely to Palmer, who sells her character’s emotions and personal journey every second she’s on screen. The individual elements of the film, unfortunately, deserve much better than the flawed whole that they get.

Alice screens on Sunday, January 30 at Liberty Hall in Lawrence as part of the Sundance Film Festival’s Satellite Screen program.