‘Detroit’ is a horror movie – Mic

The mark of a memorable horror movie is its villain. We dont remember The Texas Chainsaw Massacre for the doomed twenty-somethings who die at the hands of a cannibal family we remember Leatherface, the saw-wielding murderer who hacks them to pieces. Nor do we remember, with any clarity, the assorted teens dispatched at knife-point in the Halloween films. We remember Michael Myers, whose lurching, relentless drive to kill is still etched in our nightmares 40 years later.

Detroit, Kathryn Bigelows new film about the 1967 Detroit riots, is an unlikely heir to this legacy. In its promotional materials, the movie was marketed as an action-drama set amid the racial unrest, with John Boyega starring as the everyman fighting to navigate the chaos. This is misleading. The films centerpiece is a long, borderline-unwatchable interrogation scene at the citys Algiers Motel, where police officers hold several black menand two white womencaptive as they beat them, terrorize them into believing they will be killed if they dont cooperate and, in some cases, actually kill them.

Detroit, perhaps accidentally, is at its heart a torture-horror film in the tradition of Hostel and Saw. And its villain is Philip Krauss, a baby-faced policeman whose capacity for cruelty will leave audiences shaken long after the movie ends.

Krauss, played by 24-year-old British actor Will Poulter, is one of more memorable film villains in years. From his youthful appearance to the cartoonish way his eyebrows arch skyward, he evokes something out of a manga comic. But theres nothing cartoonish about his brutality. The havoc Krauss wreaks on the bodies and psyches of his black victims ranges from screaming obscenities in their ears, to hitting and kicking them bloody, to shooting them in the back and planting switchblades next to their bodies to make them look more threatening. He orchestrates his interrogation like a boot camp, toying with his victims using ultimatums that are impossible to meet like demanding they identify a sniper who does not, in fact, exist and vowing to kill them if they dont meet them.

By the end, Krauss emerges as a quintessential horror movie villain: a terror whose mere presence evokes fear and puts everyone elses survival in immediate doubt. He is the black hole around which all other characters orbit, whose decisions dictate the fates of nearly everyone he comes into contact with. He is the rotten soul of an already-bleak film not Boyega, contrary to advertisements, whose character Melvin Dismukes is woefully underwritten; or Algee Smith, whose performance as Larry Cleveland Reed gives the movie its most human element. At the end of the day, this is Krauss madhouse. Whether youre OK with that dictates how much youll get out of the film.

None of this is necessarily a bad thing but if acknowledged, it might help inform what audiences should expect when they go to see the film. This seems especially relevant in the wake of Angelica Jade Bastiens scathing review for RogerEbert.com, which made the rounds in July and characterized Detroit as a hollow spectacle, displaying rank racism and countless deaths that has nothing to say about race, the justice system, police brutality or the city that gives it its title.

Bastiens is not an unfair assessment. The filmmakers director Bigelow and writer Mark Boal, both of whom are white commit early to a verit-style realism that eschews any thoughtful examination of what it all means. But they undercut that realism by clumsily trying to assert that police officers arent actually as bad as the film makes them out to be.

Who could do this to someone? one Detroit officer gasps upon seeing Reed, covered in blood and bruises and recently escaped from Krauss clutches. Are we really supposed to believe this officer is so shocked? Did we not just watch an entire film showing that police violence against black people is routine?

What we are left with, then, is Detroits unrelenting violence, and a grim portrayal of how vicious Americas relationship with its black citizenry has been. Some might disagree with characterizing the film as horror, but its hard to describe a picture that dedicates so much space to torture and terror mostly confined to a single, dungeon-like locale, no less in any other way. Even when the nightmare Krauss subjects his victims to reaches its climax, the images of the escapees, drenched in their own blood, sprinting wide-eyed into the night toward safety, mirrors the closing images of so many horror movies before it.

Humanity can still be found in pockets of the film, as with Reeds excursions into church life toward the end or his early flirtations with the two white women by the Algiers pool. But audiences tolerance for Detroit will hinge largely on their tolerance for horror. It makes for an arresting moviegoing experience. But I doubt its what the filmmakers intended.

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'Detroit' is a horror movie - Mic

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero