Emergency Quicktake: Pensive, Charming & Surprisingly Intense
Sean (RJ Cyler) and Kunle (Donald Elise Watkins) are two best friends and college roommates about to have the night of their lives. It’s the start of spring break, and the duo has planned a legendary seven-stop frat party crawl.
But circumstances derail their night before the party even starts. After stopping home to change, the guys discover Emma (Maddie Nichols), a drunk (or possibly drugged) white girl passed out on their living room floor. So what’s a brother to do?
Ever the optimist, Kunle wants to call the authorities, but the world-weary Sean has other ideas. Sean knows how bad the situation looks for a couple young Black college kids. And he’s not about to get harassed by police over some random drunk chick.
Kunle, Sean, and their roommate Carlos (Sebastian Chacon) opt to covertly drop the girl off somewhere where she’ll be looked after. But getting her from point A to B is easier said than done. In classic night-from-hell-movie tradition, the guys run into one hurdle after another.
Director Carey Williams’s dark comedy Emergency spotlights the young Black men who came of age during the era of viral police killing videos and global Black Lives Matter protests. KD Davila’s complicated screenplay is timely, insightful, and more often than not, speaks to my own lived experience. But at other times, the story bludgeons you with its painfully on-the-nose themes.
At one point, a suspicious Karen doesn’t like seeing Kunle, Sean, and Carlos parked in front of her house. She accuses them of being drug dealers and chases them off while screaming out threats. As the guys drive off, the camera pulls back to reveal a Black Lives Matter sign on the vile woman’s lawn. The film acknowledges this act of performative wokeness without saying anything meaningful.
Emergency is at its best when its two leads butt heads and challenge each other’s notions of authentic blackness. Kunle, the buttoned-up child of a successful immigrant, sees the world through rose-coloured glasses. He still believes that if he lives life by the book, being Black won’t hurt his chance of success.
Sean may act like he’s carefree, but he’s been jaded by the problematic way white people perceive him. Sean knows that Black folks don’t have to do anything wrong for trouble to find them.
In a lesser film, these two would come across like one-dimensional talking points commenting on their place in society. And at times, the movie leans into using characters as mouthpieces for moral grandstanding. Fortunately, Watkins and Cyler’s great chemistry masks some of the script’s wonkier aspects.
Kunle and Sean won’t go down as one of the great Black odd couple pairings (a la Kid and Play or Will and Carlton), but their fun-loving dynamic effortlessly carries the movie.
Emergency takes a long hard look at the concept of white privilege. There’s a population of furious white folks who bristle at the notion of white privilege. And I’ve heard too many conversations where they deny it exists or imply whites are worse off than people of colour. With Emergency, Williams and Davila blow up this delusional notion, showing the casual ways white privilege and entitlement wreak havoc on people of colour.
The film shows us how white privilege can be as unassuming as walking out your front door. That’s because people of colour aren’t afforded the opportunity to move through the world without understanding how we’re perceived in the spaces we navigate.
For example, Emma gets wrecked at a party, goes home alone, and ends up in the wrong house. If Sean behaved that way he would end up shot or in jail. Despite moving through the world like a wrecking ball, Emma’s well-being becomes everyone’s priority.
Carlos, Kunle, and Sean make it their mission to get Emma to safety and put their own need’s on the back-burner until that happens. Meanwhile, these three men of colour must wrestle with the complications that come with calling for help. They can’t even do the right thing and call an ambulance without risking their freedom and safety. There’s a significant chance the cops don’t believe the guys’ story, or worse yet, assess the situation as a threat and show up with their guns drawn.
For Black men, navigating through the world means constantly wrestling with how white people see us. We don’t often get the final say on how the world perceives. That’s because our actions and intentions get distorted through the lens of white preconceptions. We must always react to small-minded people who see us as inferior, hypersexual, or threatening.
Every day I look at my news feed and see a different story about unobtrusive Black people being profiled, persecuted, misjudged, and dehumanized. Time and again black folks who did nothing wrong wind up in life and death situations. And the common thread between these ill-fated people is not temperament, fashion sense, or education level: the only common thread is the colour of their skin.
This constant assault on black bodies makes us all feel like we’re under attack from all directions. Emergency is the story of how two young Black men with opposing views on Blackness confront these feelings.
We can distract ourselves through booze and blunts like Sean. Or we can sublimate those fears like Kunle, believing straight A’s and proper diction will prevent us from becoming the next Breonna Taylor or Ahmaud Arbery.
Emergency presents a clear-eyed case of how people can inhabit the same space but exist in different realities.
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