It’s a weird movie, Dary.

2022’s Alice may be too weird to recommend to the general viewing audience, which may explain why the movie has a pretty divisive 30% rating among critics and 57% among audiences on Rotten Tomatoes. And I like weird movies where almost nothing is explained to the viewer and you’re left to put the pieces together yourself and try to make sense of the world the characters live in. But Alice might be too weird.

The directorial debut of Krystin Ver Linden, Alice is going to confuse the hell out of anyone who has seen the poster but not the trailer. Roughly the first 40 minutes of the film takes place on a slave plantation where Alice (Keke Palmer) lives under the harsh ownership of one Paul Bennett (Jonny Lee Miller). But things are not as they seem in the world, as another slave talks about meeting a man who could make fire with his hands. He shows a lighter that doesn’t quite look of the time period.

After running away from the plantation, Alice escapes through the woods and inexplicably finds herself in 1970s America. Slavery is long since over, we have fancy technology like televisions, cars, and bologna sandwiches, and even better? We have Pam Grier movies now. And boy howdy does Alice find herself watching a lot of Pam Grier movies alongside her newfound friend Frank (Common).

Frank meanwhile is a dude who hasn’t quite found himself yet. He has fought for freedom, sure, but he works long and hard under his controlling brother whose treatment toward the “migrants” that work on their farm, while better than the old days, still isn’t great and is a bit reminiscent of Paul and his treatment of the “domestics”. Perhaps Frank can learn just as much from Alice as Alice can from Frank? Who knows, this is a movie after all. Anything can happen in a film with a time-traveling forest.

Alice has a decent cast with some good performances here and there even if Keke Palmer and Common lack chemistry and their performances often feel forced. The soundtrack is chock full of 70s music. The concept is interesting, a woman comes to the modern day from slave times and learns about everything that has happened in the hundred years since. We also see a couple other characters adapt to life in modern times.

The worst thing I can say about Alice is that the movie starts off slow and then at the halfway point starts sprinting and never stops. I’m fine with the fact that the film never explains the time-traveling forest, in fact I’m glad that it doesn’t. What makes the movie so weird is how casually the world seems to accept the existence of the time traveling forest. There’s a few characters who actually travel through the forest including a part at the end where a whole lot of people just show up on the other side not really curious on where they are. Which really begs the question on how much the world is aware of this forest and how many people have accidentally or intentionally traveled through it.

It seems really easy to just wander through. Alice decides later on in the film that she’s going to go back and save the people she left behind so they can all be free. Unfortunately this happens with about 8 minutes left in the film, so there’s very little vengeance in this story. It’s about 35 minutes of slave drama, 45 minutes of Alice learning about slavery, blacksploitation films, the civil rights movement, and pretty much all the other stuff that happened since her time. And then, once again, about 8-9 minutes of Django Unchained.

Which gets me to something of a final comment about the movie; it’s hard to sell a film that can’t answer the question of why are we here, and what you want out of the film. And regardless of what you want, what you get is probably not going to be that. Unless you want a film where a slave learns about the Emancipation Proclamation. Alice isn’t a very good slave film because it shies away from showing the brutality of slavery. It’s not a very good time travel movie because it’s mostly just Alice reading books and watching movies in a montage. And it’s not a good vengeance movie because that part is literally about 9 minutes total.

For her directorial debut, Alice isn’t terrible. I’m looking forward to seeing what Krystin Ver Linden comes up with next.

Rating: C+