Queen & Slim/Blow the Man Down

Courtesy of Universal Studios/Amazon Studios.

2019 seems very far away, so too does my viewing of Queen & Slim and Blow the Man Down back in March. It’s taken that amount of time coupled with various social upheavals to realize why these films were so difficult to review individually. Both are written and directed by women, involve evading the law due to murder in self-defense, and are films I would absolutely recommend watching as excellent examples of the Neo-noir genre. There, the similarities stop. What lies on either side of this overlap are issues of privilege, media production, and the injustice of racial bias. These reviews aren’t meant to critique the technical or artistic merit of these films, rather to contrast the way in which their protagonists’ shared crime, murder in self-defense, is presented and how I came to view them. Spoilers ahead.

Blow the Man Down came first, as recommended by my fellow white, middle-class, and reasonably educated oldest friend. Growing up in the same small Massachusetts town, we sang Christmas carols in Girl Scouts in our common’s gazebo, watched over by a steepled church and a racially homogenous community. Blow the Man Down, an Amazon Prime Original, was written and directed by female filmmakers Danielle Krudy and Massachusetts native Bridget Savage Cole. It follows two sisters, Priscilla and Mary Beth Connolly, running the Maine family seafood shop in the wake of their mother’s death. Surrounded by family and friends, all of whom are various shades of Irish Catholic, the sisters clash over money issues and contrasting ties to their dying hometown. It’s a sad but commonplace story in New England fishing villages, especially for those communities impacted by industrial fishing and exhausted waters. The grizzled, yellow slickered remainders literally shanty their way through the film, a Greek chorus for a twenty-first century tragedy.

When Mary Beth storms off after an argument, she makes the cardinal townie mistake of going home drunk with the only guy in the bar with whom she did not attend high school. After making a grisly discovery in the trunk of his car, she’s chased through a labyrinth of lobster cages, finally harpooning her attacker through the chest. Hopped up on adrenaline, still wasted, and frightened, Mary Beth enlists Priscilla’s help in disposing of the body. Local tip: if you find a large cooler on the beach, resist the temptation to open it and just keep walking. While looking through his dock shack the girls find a bag of cash, entrenching them in the town’s grimy under-the-table workings. As sometimes happens with knowing older women, Priscilla and Mary Beth are exposed to the town matriarchs’ darker side, and even learning how their mother took drastic measures to keep the small community safe. Written for and by the #metoo and Murderino generation, Blow the Man Down nonetheless ends with maintenance of the status quo; the girls are protected, but now they can never really leave.

Sophie Lowe and Morgan Saylor, courtesy Jeong Park/Amazon Studios.

Queen & Slim came to my screen quite differently. I remember seeing the trailer in a small arthouse cinema early 2019, being excited to see it, and then promptly forgetting about the film. It must have had a short run, as this was when I could still frequent the theaters, and never saw a screening listed. A few months later, the trailer was suggested on YouTube. Not yet released, I put it on my IMDb list and again forgot about it, never seeing another ad. Not until about a year later did I see Queen & Slim available at the bottom of a Red Box kiosk display at my parents’ local grocery store. Unlike the polished stream of Blow the Man Down, this film was on a DVD with the same thickness of the AOL discs old millennials like me will remember receiving in the mail. Blu-ray was not an available option. The resolution was some of the poorest I’ve ever seen, skipping every twenty seconds halfway through the film, and I’ve watched some ancient library hockey pucks. This lack of publicity and attention for a new release is common for straight-to-DVD Disney sequels and B cult horror movies, yet due to the top-shelf quality of the film itself, I powered through and wondered why such a great piece of work had received such shoddy distribution.

When I looked up the creative forces behind the work, it was even more of a shock. Director Melina Matsoukas has worked with no less than Beyoncé on her Formation music videos, as well as with Jennifer Lopez and Rihanna. Written by actor and Emmy-award winning screenwriter Lena Waithe, Queen & Slim also co-stars Oscar-nominated actor Daniel Kaluuya of Get Out (2017) fame. We follow him and the stunning Jodie Turner-Smith through a first Tinder date from Hell. At first ill-suited to one another, the pair becomes inextricably bonded when a dirtbag cop pulls them over after their awkward diner meet-up, obviously with racially charged motivations. Queen, a lawyer, doesn’t take any of the cop’s disrespect, demanding a warrant when he asks to search the car and filming with her phone when the situation immediately escalates. If the reader is unfamiliar with how these transactions usually end by now, they must have either been in a coma for the past few years or willfully negligent. And yet, the tables turn. After Queen’s leg is wounded by the cop’s stray bullet, Slim wrestles his gun away and delivers the final blow, hesitating even after just being under the gun himself.

Jodie Turner-Smith and Daniel Kaluuya, courtesy of Campbell Addy/Universal Studios.

It’s an impossible situation from all angles, and a sobering realization that a cop killed by a black man would not be considered self-defense. Queen knows their legal odds, at best life in prison as the death penalty is still legal in Ohio, and convinces Slim to flee. They travel across the country, protected by friends and family, but never without suspicion or causing some type of unrest. During their chase, Queen and Slim immediately accrue a legendary cult status, gaining support from protestors against police brutality around the country. Even Queen’s uncle greets them as “the black Bonnie and Clyde,” a comparison dismissed by the creators and actors despite its inclusion in the dialogue. Forced into becoming criminals, the couple fall in love as they and the audience learn more about their lives. Waithe emphasizes in the linked interview that their intention was to “humanize” Queen and Slim, not just as characters, but specifically as Black people. Although that shouldn’t have to be such an important motivation of this film, it is true that it’s inherently easier for me to identify with a film directed by someone who grew up twenty miles away from where I did. It’s also true that this is not an excuse for complacency or self-justification in continuing to only watch films involving people who look like me.

Loyal to form, Queen & Slim ends how most manhunts of people of color usually do, OJ Simpson being a notable exception. Instead of being romantically pursued by the cute local policeman as Priscilla was in Blow the Man Down, Queen dies alongside Slim in a hail of bullets. Unlike the Connolly sisters, whose lives begin anew as the heirs of their small town’s gritty underside after accidentally christening themselves with an outsider’s blood, Queen and Slim’s lives are taken away from them just as quickly. There’s no team of flinty old women in fishermen’s sweaters to clean up their mess, and certainly nothing to which they can return in their own city. Both duos righteously defended themselves, and yet the drastically different consequences to their actions are a case study in what kind of justice the viewer is willing to accept or deny. It’s furthermore a reminder, should the viewer need it, that Black Lives Matter. It took a string of cold-blooded murders for producers to give Black cinema the prominence it deserves, especially in a country that places tantamount emotional and cultural value in its television time. I’m no moralist, but on the list of injustices addressed in this comparison, I’d have to place being spoon-fed Blow the Man Down while needing to dig for Queen & Slim rather high.*

Margot Martindale and Bokeem Woodbine, courtesy of Amazon Studios/Lelanie Foster.

*As of the publication of this article, Queen & Slim is available to rent online for $6 USD and up, while Blow the Man Down is and will most likely always be free for Amazon Prime subscribers.

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Zoë G. Burnett is a writer, film enthusiast, and ad woman based in Massachusetts. A lover of all things spooky and sparkly, she is currently working on her first book about witchcraft and classic style. Zoë is a Contributing Editor and The Attic on Eighth’s Film Columnist.