This emergency needs to be seen, stat
Nominated for the Grand Jury prize at Sundance this year, Emergency took home the Festival’s Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. After seeing the film, you’ll understand why. Adapting her 2018 Sundance short of the same name into a full length feature, screenwriter K.D. Dávila has done something sly here. She starts the picture as if we’re in for a spring break high jinks, wild college party comedy à la Animal House. But then she turns the tables in such a dramatic, urgent, and tense fashion that you’ll leave the picture reeling. And that’s a good thing.
Dávila’s words are again brought to life by director Carey Williams, who also helmed the short. He has the tricky job of balancing genuine comedic, laugh-out-loud moments with darker plot elements that underscore the picture’s thought provoking, heavier themes. He succeeds in this delicate and difficult endeavor thanks in large part to his terrific cast, who all do exceptional, nuanced work here.
The film’s opening almost sounds like a creative writing class exercise: You arrive home to get ready for a night of partying, and find a strange woman passed out on your sofa. What do you do? If you immediately think, “Call 911, of course,” you probably aren’t living in the same world as our three protagonists. They are Kunle (Donald Elise Watkins), Sean (RJ Cyler, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl), and Carlos (Sebastian Chacon), college seniors and housemates, who happen to be Black and Latinx, respectively. And the unknown, passed out girl is white. Calling the cops, then, becomes an act fraught with an unease and fear, as faced by so many young men of color today. Will they be blamed? Believed? Arrested? Or worse?
Here’s where Dávila’s script jumps into gear, and begins to move away from its lighthearted, last-party-of-the year premise. Kunle, bound for graduate school at Princeton and the son of doctors, wants to call 911. Sean, more into partying and also more wary of what that decision might mean for the trio, disagrees. Carlos, a socially-awkward video-game addict, leans towards Sean’s point of view. Outvoted, Kunle and his friends proceed with a plan to drop the girl at a hospital, not knowing that the girl’s sister, Maddie (Sabrina Carpenter) is hot on their tail, and assumes the worst of her sister’s rescuers.
What follows, then, is a high stakes story of race, privilege, misconceptions and preconceived notions, unspooled not in an austere, pedantic way, but in a sharply realistic and yes, often darkly humorous manner that lets us really see and feel the complicated dimensions and motivations of every character. By the end of the film, we see that each character is much more complex than initially presented. We may think we know these people, the film suggests, based on quick perceptions of clothing, attitudes, and speech, but those superficial indicators are usually just that, and usually only reflect a small part of who a person truly is.
Emergency also works as an astute examination of male friendships, a gentle ribbing of modern college culture, and as a clear-eyed exploration of trauma and PTSD. The ending, in particular, is one of the most incisive finales ever written for the screen, and you’ll find yourself thinking about it long after the picture concludes. The filmmakers have succeeded in packing a thematic punch into a film that, far from suffering under the weight of its message, provides crisp, pointed humor and unbearable, edge-of-your seat tension. My guess is that its Sundance accolades will be just a few of the many this smartly crafted, highly entertaining picture is bound to receive.
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Emergency opens today at select Bay Area theaters (including at Berkeley’s Landmark Shattuck, which you should go support to say goodbye and thanks for the memories). The film will also be available on Amazon Prime next Friday, May 27th.
