White Girl (2019)

So, there is a short film on Shudder called White Girl.  It's directed by Nadia Latif.  It's 13 minutes long.

The plot is fairly simple, as befits a short film.  The titular white girl - a wholesome looking teen - wanders the streets of London, interacting briefly with various people - usually people of colour who react in a variety of ways, mostly guarded or hostile.

In the end she is approached by an elderly woman in a hijab, and the girl savagely murders her.

This is the picture pretty much everyone uses when they talk about this film, so I'll use it, too.

On Shudder, a lot of the reviews complain about racism.  I mean, what are we to make of this?

no polotics for Satans sakes

Or what about:

Next up, the sequel "Black Girl" and the prequal "Arab girl" and the remake "Asian Girl"....Oh, wait. Thats right, your only allowed to point at white folks in "current year". If people cant see the psychological programming going on in Hollywood these days, I feel sorry for you.

Clearly, people with NO IDEA of how to use apostrophes are very triggered by short films foregrounding violence against people of colour.  Makes you wonder how many of them enjoy bonehead action films where "The Black Guy Dies First" (interestingly, not necessarily a horror film trope at all, but certainly a feature of dimly macho action films in the 1980s.)

The cry for no 'polotics' is to profoundly ignore the reality that horror is almost always political - because controversy is political.  What the poster really meant, of course, is 'no politics I don't like,' which is the most conservative and anti-horror statement imaginable.

These comments reveal, perhaps, something about the people writing those reviews. I think it is fascinating how people have reacted to the film - so much anger, so much paranoia triggered by two words. People need to take a look at themselves and think why they respond like this. Nadia Latif needs to be saluted for causing such upset with just 13 minutes and a simple title.

Another common - and related - complaint from those just polite enough not to want to sound openly racist is 'double standards' because (they argue) a film called 'Black Girl' about a psychopathic black teenager would never be made.  Actually, it sounds kinda cool and I bet you could.  But that's by-the-bye because they are basing their 'objection' on a false premise - the opposite of a white girl is not a black girl but a black man - and the presence of the male black predator has lingered in media cinema for a very, very long time and has more troubling consequences in the real world than the ruffling of feathers on a horror film streaming site.

The whole concept of White Girl could have arisen from a reversal of this infamous moment from DW Griffith's race baiting Birth of a Nation - posing the question, what if the sweetly innocent white girl was empowered and had other ideas than jumping off a cliff to preserve her chastity?

The incredible thing is, this is probably only the THIRD most racist scene in the film..

Turns out - according to Latif - she won't take her razor to black men, but will behave in a manner similar to how the black man does - attacking the vulnerable, the isolated and the weak.

My hunch is the film is something of a remake of Sam Fuller's film White Dog, about a dog which was trained to attack black people. 

This film is NOT Turner & Hooch.

White Girl is just taking the concept a stage further - now we have a sweet seeming girl trained to do the same, wandering the streets and waiting for a vulnerable victim to materialize. The people she encounters are not suitable targets - they are too savvy, streetwise and not alone.

It's a film about the corrosive effects of racism, and how the truly evil people who dream of a race war are 'red pilling' young people and turning them into weapons - think of the endless carnage of race based shooting rampages, like the mass murders just the other day at Buffalo, and countless other bloody rampages before - and inevitably after.

Star Rating: ***