A Fantastic Ensemble Navigates the Uneven, Cop-Eluding Thriller-Comedy Emergency

This review was originally published as part of Paste’s 2022 Sundance coverage.
Nobody ever wants to find an unconscious white girl on their living room floor. But if you’re Black? If you’re Black and you have plans? That’s a surefire way to ruin a night. This is what happens to Princeton-bound stick-in-the-mud Kunle (Donald Elise Watkins) and party boy Sean (RJ Cyler), college best friends who just want to go on a massive, World’s End-level tour of frat parties. Now they’re stuck with a medical situation in a duct-tape dress that doubles as a laser sight for the targets already on their backs. Emergency’s night-out-gone-wrong caper sees director Carey Williams and writer K.D. Dávila reteam to expand upon their sweaty and sharp 2018 short of the same name. The feature version’s fantastic ensemble and tense premise provides plenty of squirmy laughter, but its prolonged evening suffers diminishing returns.
At its core, Emergency is a comedy of self-preservation masquerading as a comedy of errors. Kunle and Sean arrive home after a searingly funny scene in which their British professor delights in saying the N-word and everyone turns around to look at the pair like the “Say the Line, Bart!” meme to find this passed-out blonde death sentence. If it were ever in question as to why Sean might be adamant Kunle not call the cops, the intentionally provocative racism of the lead-in reminds everyone how casually they could become casualties. So it’s not hard to buy their solution-seeking freakout, especially considering that Sean and their nerdy roommate Carlos (Sebastian Chacon)—who just wanted to hit a bong and play Civ all night—are pretty high right now. Everyone into the van.
The strongest parts of Emergency follow. The trio and their Wheat-Skinned at Bernie’s hijinks are hilarious, bolstered by the complex rapport between Watkins, Cyler and Chacon’s odd yet recognizable third-wheel. Williams expertly runs them through an increasingly intense gamut that piles the college sins of drunk driving, wandering around stoned, trying to hook up with a crush, having annoying friends and maintaining academic ambitions on top of a basic and essential knowledge that the cops are a bigger threat than resource. It’s here that the film uses the race of its characters to inform and enhance its silly situations in unspoken ways (frat boys clad in beer carton armor hucking PBRs is hilariously goofy until one clips a taillight), which becomes less subtle and more on-the-nose as the night goes on.
Part of this is due to how the movie deals with the girl—who wakes up from time to time, undermining the movie’s strongest driving force to explain that her name is Emma (Maddie Nichols) before conking out again until it’s (in)convenient—and those seeking her. Emma’s sister Maddy (Sabrina Carpenter) leads a hunt for her that’s more of a distraction than anything, diluting a pure and fearful premise that was made all the more effective by its impenetrable mystery and inherent focus on the trio’s POV. “The incapacitated white girl” works so well as a silent symbol that Emergency’s waffling on whether to explore her and her sister as characters takes away some of that power.