Review: A superb Keke Palmer keeps underdeveloped ‘Alice’ mostly on track

There’s a contact of “The Handmaid’s Story” and a little bit of “The Village” evident in “Alice,” a revenge thriller with an uncommon premise. Written and directed by Krystin Ver Linden, the movie makes use of photographs from nineteenth century American slave plantations and twentieth century Black liberation actions as the inspiration for a Seventies-style motion image. Whereas Ver Linden’s concepts by no means fairly coalesce, “Alice” is not less than persistently difficult.

Keke Palmer offers an excellent efficiency because the title character, who toils as a “home” on a Georgia plantation, the place she and her fellow servants — all enslaved — are handled cruelly by the land’s proprietor, Paul (Jonny Lee Miller). When Alice is pushed too far, she escapes … solely to find that she’s truly residing within the yr 1973.

Ver Linden spends roughly the primary third of “Alice” — the weakest third — scrutinizing plantation life. To protect its large twist (revealed within the movie’s trailer), the film sticks with a reasonably typical slave narrative, dropping in just a few hints that one thing is off. It’s a missed alternative to have interaction extra absolutely with the query of how and why Paul preserves the phantasm of the antebellum South.

After Alice escapes, she meets a truck driver named Frank, performed by Frequent (who can also be liable for the movie’s wonderful soundtrack, harking back to lush ’70s R&B). As Frank tries to assist this girl who has no final identify, no tackle and no familiarity with fashionable expertise or mores, “Alice” settles into its simplest part. Ver Linden’s determination to set the film in 1973 proves particularly impressed right here, since this was a time when Black People had been rising as a cultural and political pressure whereas nonetheless dealing with the headwinds of oppression.

For the film’s last third, although, Ver Linden shifts once more to one thing much less unique, as a vengeful, gun-toting Alice — impressed by Pam Grier films — heads again to the plantation. To get to that climactic motion sequence, Alice’s character turns into a complete different particular person extremely shortly; and within the course of quite a bit about her journey to self-determination will get misplaced.

Nonetheless, even when “Alice” doesn’t work, it stays gripping. Ver Linden underdevelops her “what if” situation, however thanks largely to Palmer the movie is an interesting character examine, a few girl who strikes abruptly from a society the place she needed to accept a drawing of Anna Karenina in a e-book as an aspirational picture to a world the place she sees Diana Ross on the quilt of “Rolling Stone.” At its finest, this film is a portrait of what actual change seems to be like — and a name to maintain going.