Tyrel: A Messy Portrait of Progressivism
Tyrel is a movie with a glaringly similar premise that is all too familiar, it is about a lone black man spending the weekend with a group of white men over the weekend while his girlfriend Carmen has her family over at their apartment.
The movie tugs at the underlying tensions socially built within this premise, racial anxiety, masculinity, and ultimately American politics. It even lightly touches upon religion. This place of underlying tension is where Tyrel shines best, it takes a subtle approach to the social tensions of a setup like this and baits its audience into thinking something drastic is going to happen only to completely subvert it.
The movie gets its namesake from a scene where one of the white guys mispronounces the protagonist Tyler’s name giving it a racialized spin of “Tyrel”. This happens early in the film, from then on the film builds upon these small moments consistently building the tension giving the audience the impression that this tension will explode with dire consequences.
The tensions do explode but not in an acme TNT explosion way but in a softer more passive way which is consistent with the tone of the movie, that people have implicit biases which bring in underlying tensions into everyday interactions that often do not get fully addressed.
