Text Review: Two Distant Strangers

For my text review, I chose to analyze the recent film Two Distant Strangers on Netflix. The movie tells a story about a young African American man who’s trying to make it back home to his family from his girlfriend’s house but when he leaves his girlfriend’s apartment, he’s confronted by a police officer who ends up killing him. The twist in this movie was that after he was killed, he woke up in his girlfriend’s bed in the same morning before he had died. He keeps attempting to get home, but every time the police officer confronts him in some sort of way and ends up killing him, so the the man ends up waking up and repeating that day over and over again. The film really shows the discrimination that African Americans face especially at the hands of the police. The first time he was killed, was because he was smoking a cigarette that the officer mistook for weed and a confrontation ensued. The next time he was killed just because the officer wanted to see his bag in which another confrontation ensued. He ended up living that day around 100 times and eventually he convinced the officer that every time he killed him, he’d wake up and repeat that day. Even with the officer knowing, somehow he still ended up getting killed before he could make it home. The film ended with the officer who kept killing him personally driving him home so nothing would happen to him. This film really emphasized police brutality and how with no significant evidence or wrongdoing, people of color are targeted. Just like the main character of the movie, who never got to explain himself before he kept getting killed, minorities never get to tell their side of the story, especially when it comes to the police. This reminded me of the idea of the “the subaltern”, the people whose voices are not heard by the ones in power. In the case of this film, the main character was the subaltern who never got his voice heard by the man in power who was the police officer.

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