Being Film #13 for Hooptober 2024
The beautiful thing about The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster is how much of a “first film” it is, in the best possible way. The directorial debut of Bomani J. Story, this is a film very much full of ideas, using genre to get at the heart of gnarly and thorny issues that rise above with some truly sublime moments, even as the overall narrative and directing get a little, well…messy at times. But it’s so easily forgiven because behind every odd edit, every cheap (though some are fantastic) visual effect you can see the beating heart of a storyteller, and his cast matches the pump and thrum of that heart in perfect time.
THE QUICK SUMMARY: Vicaria sees the disease all around her…and it’s taken her family one by one. The disease is death, and is particularly contagious in her part of town where gang violence and drugs are not only a way of life, but seemingly the only way when the larger community, educational system, and the law treat you as less than human. When Vicaria’s older brother Chris is gunned down in a drug deal, she vows to find a cure for the disease and through her ingenuity and the careful snatching of dead bodies brings Chris back. Only problem is, he’s not the same as he was, and he’s still seen as a monster in the eyes of the community he comes back to. What to do except be the thing you’re painted as, huh? Soon V. realizes the cost of her choice and must make another if she’s going to save her family.
The best parts of Story’s script isn’t the fantastical monster elements, which actually get a little too convoluted with the other story he’s trying to tell: how both Chris and the rest of Vicaria’s family and neighborhood were ALWAYS seen as monsters by the institutions around them. And it’s in those moments where The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster really thrives. It’s helps that everyone in the cast is phenomenal, but huge extra shout out to lead Laya DeLeon as Vicaria. She is absolutely stunning in the role, giving everything from joy to pain to anguish and righteous anger through the course of the film. There is a scene at school that is more painful to watch than any scene of death in this thing, and it’s aided by another great performance: Chad L. Coleman as her father, grieving and addicted to the drugs sold by the neighborhood gangbanger Kango but still with it enough to go down to the school and lay down an almost biblical lashing at the teacher who has been levying both micro- and macro-aggressions at Vicaria. They are the heart and soul of the movie, and there is a dinner scene later that holds so much love and fear and anguish it’s gut-wrenching to watch for its intimacy.
The monster stuff is fine, although the motivations of both Chris in his creature phase and his actions later get more than a little muddled. But I love the practical effects, and the digital pieces are at once both very obvious and also very much an homage to the kinds of films I imagine Story watched growing up. Those films, Frankenstein (very obviously) and Story’s own life color The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster so that all those freshman gaffes and mixed narrative make me appreciate the film all the more. I can’t wait to see what this crew does next.
Cinema Dual 
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