by Jason Adams
Let's just start with what matters most: Keke Palmer is a star. If not quite yet in the technical terms of massive name recognition and box office numbers then in all of the ethereal qualities that makes one get to those places soon enough. (The Jordan Peele movie coming out later this year is probably going to kick all of this into proper gear.) I have obviously noted Keke's razzle and her dazzle in earlier roles -- I remember thinking she was destined to be going places several years back with Scream Queens. But watching the premiere of Alice this weekend at Sundance, a proper star vehicle if ever there was one, this sense really grabbed me about the shoulders and shook me up -- she's got that It, baby. The reason why this was my biggest takeaway is that Alice simply wouldn't work without her...
I'm not entirely convinced it even works with her.
But Keke provides such power, such pain, such seam-gathering glue, she's like that legendarily memorable shot of Chris Evans and his biceps straining to hold that helicopter from departing that rooftop in one of those Captain America movies -- Alice is a couple of movies at war with itself and Keke is, by sheer force of personality, giving us the spectacle we desire.
When we first meet Alice she's the unfortunate favorite slave of the leering-eyed plantation master Paul Bennet (Jonny Lee Miller with a convincing leer and an even more convincing southern accent). He's taught Alice to read so she can read to him and his son, but his attentions are hardly literary -- he wants her beside him at all times. So much so that when he senses a secret romance budding between Alice and another one of his slaves, Joseph (Gaius Charles), he does everything within his power to keep them apart. And Mr. Bennet has all of the power. And he wields it as cruelly as you'd expect.
And all of this does indeed go just about how you'd expect -- we've seen this same traumatic slave narrative hundreds of times by now, and the only thing that kept me plowing through it this time was Palmer, giving every expected beat her all.
Well her, plus the strange sense of weirdness that starts creeping into the story here and there like the Spanish moss hanging from the old oak trees walling in this little Georgian world-unto-itself. One of the slaves tells a story of a strange man they saw once emerge from the woods, and not long after Joseph begins digging up graves for clues... in the wake of Get Out we've seen so many race-based horror films spring up that director Krystin Ver Linden gets us expecting another terrifying shoe to drop -- for the monsters to come poking out of the cotton and start gobbling people up some way, somehow.
Indeed the best thing beside Palmer to happen to Alice is actually the stink of the 2020 slave-horror flick Antebellum that's still lingering in the air of our expectations, because the second act of Alice has some similar tricks up its sleeve to that movie, but it does a far far better job with them. I'm not going to spoil where Alice goes (although its surprises aren't exactly being hidden by the film's marketing department, which is probably for the best) but the ride's ultimately worth every one of the twists and turns because Palmer's performance grabs every disparate strand of them and keeps it all not too big, not too small -- just perfectly Alice-sized, right where it belongs. Come catch this star on her grand ascendance and you will not be sorry.