Written and directed by Justin Simien
Starring Elle Loraine, Vanessa Williams, Jay Pharoah, Chanté Adams, Blaire Underwood and Michelle Hurd
Running time: 1 hour and 55 minutes
Unrated: contains  violence, sexual situations and language

by Audrey Callerstrom

In Bad Hair’s opening scene, we meet Anna Bludso (Zaria Kelley), a young black girl. Her sister, Linda (Corinne Massiah) thinks it’s time that Anna starts looking like the rest of the women in the family. So she decides to try relaxing Anna’s hair at home. “You’re tender-headed,” Linda tells her while yanking Anna’s hair every which way to apply the product. Linda’s hair is long and sleek, while Anna’s hair is natural and short and she usually wears it on top of her head. Up until a year ago, Linda was Anna’s cousin, until unspoken circumstances brought Anna into the family. The girls laugh and joke with each other, until there’s a sound. A sizzling sound. You do not want to hear that sound while you are doing something with your hair. The chemicals that Linda put in Anna’s hair have singed the back of her head. In addition to a severe chemical burn, pieces of Anna’s hair start to spill into the bath.

This traumatic, effective scene jump-starts writer/director Justin Simien’s second feature film, Bad Hair. Following 2014’s Dear White People (and the subsequent series of the same name), Simien moves away from satire/drama and into satire/horror. About twenty years after the incident (Los Angeles, 1989, to be exact), we meet the grown Anna (newcomer Elle Loraine, who appeared on the Dear White People series as well as Insecure), who works for a music video program called Culture. It’s a program that plays Black music, including the popular artist Sandra (Destiny’s Child’s Kelly Rowland). Only, like so many other things that feel authentic and close to one’s culture, Culture is soon rebranded “Cult” and taken over by Zora, an aptly cast Vanessa Williams. Zora has big, beautiful, long, silky hair. She sees potential in Anna, in spite of Anna’s soft-spoken demeanor and wallpaper-patterned blouses. Only one thing is holding Anna back – her hair.

Simien amplifies the sound of people tending to their hair. Take, for example, when veejay Julius (Jay Pharaoh, Saturday Night Live) brushes his high-top fade. You can hear the coarse bristles pushing through his hair as if he’s sitting next to you. You can hear and see the pain that Anna endures to get her weave, put in by Virgie (Laverne Cox, Orange is the New Black). It’s graphic and upsetting, particularly because of how expressive Lorraine is at showing her pain. Her hair is pulled, her scalp punctured, her shrieks of pain ignored. Virgie pierces the scar on Anna’s scalp. We feel how the grown Anna carries that young Anna with her in every scene, Lorraine is that good. The casting is spot-on. Bad Hair counts among its cast MC Lyte, Michelle Hurd (from A Different World), Blair Underwood, Robin Thede (creator of A Black Lady Sketch Show), Usher, Lena Waithe and my personal favorite, stand-up comedian and Nailed It host, Nicole Byer in a brief cameo as Anna’s neighbor. 

Bad Hair has the foundation to be an intimate portrayal of the pressures of black women to change the hair they were born with. As soon as Anna gets her weave, people are nice to her, treat her better. She turns heads. She starts to dress differently. She feels seen. Simien, however, isn’t up to the task of properly carrying out the film’s message. It falls clumsily into a standard Monster Movie, complete with some rather bad CGI and a lack of practical effects. It never justifies its nearly two-hour running time, pushing through awkward, redundant scenes that should have been cut. This was how I felt about Dear White People, too - good ideas and performances, weak execution.  It’s too much of a coincidence that Anna’s father, played by Blair Underwood, tells her slave folklore stories about the “Moss Haired Girl” right around the time she gets her weave. Underwood pops up to share the book and then disappears. Williams’s performance is often amusing, particularly when she shrieks sarcastically about a “Killer Weave Support Group,” but something about her performance feels softened, like Simien wanted to hold her back from being too campy. That would have been more fun to watch.

I thought back to the onslaught of “meh” or “that was fine” horror movies that came out following Scream, when studios realized that audiences had an appetite for horror. What was the running theme between them, besides blood, knives and dangerously low-rise jeans? All those casts were white. POC in those films would pop up to get killed or they would comment on how black people always get killed in horror movies, so the filmmakers could pat themselves on the back just to erase that character from the rest of the running time (or kill them). Back then, a horror film about a killer weave with an all-black  cast would have been considered a gamble. Not today. Even if I don’t think Bad Hair overcomes its obstacles as a whole, I am happy to watch the genre evolve as the world evolves, telling stories that bring new perspectives to horror.

Bad Hair is available watch on Hulu Friday, October 23.