“Messages about art, exploitation, gentrification, and police brutality are all here, but they pull away attention from each other instead of working together to make a cohesive narrative.
This just ends up being one of those movies where the baddie’s plan is so complicated that you just end up ignoring the plot for the sake of getting through the thing. People know things because they just do. Things work out as planned because they just do.
I think there was a real missed opportunity here to tell a story about Black artists creating real expressions of pain that end up mostly being examined and enjoyed by White people, which would be a meta narrative I could get behind, but it felt like the movie kept shying away from going hard at one idea or another and instead spread itself thin. The result is an unclear commentary laid over a complete mess of a horror plot.”