Movie Review: 'Karen' Starring Taryn Manning

Karen stars Taryn Manning as the ultimate embodiment of toxic white privilege, the living meme of Karen. Karen is an openly bigoted and unhinged fascist who becomes triggered a when she finds out that her new neighbors are a black couple, Malik and Amani, played by Cory Hardrict and Jasmine Burke. Karen can’t stand having black neighbors and her mask of civility falls away almost immediately as she schemes to get the couple to move out as quickly as they moved in.

Karen’s malevolent narcissism is made clear in an early scene wherein she is at a restaurant in a suburban neighborhood and she sets about asking the manager to remove a pair of black customers that Karen believes are being too loud during their lunch. Her malignancy continues at a meeting of the local Home Owners Association where she calls on the HOA members to levy a fine against Malik for smoking marijuana in his car, parked in front of his house.

And then things escalate even further when three young black men, one of whom lives in the neighborhood catch, Karen’s wrath. Simply walking home and minding their own business, Karen stops the young men and asks for their identification to prove they are from the neighborhood. While they film her, Karen calls her brother, a local police officer, who shows up and arrests the young men despite them having not committed a crime.

Other scenes show Karen attending a party at Malik and Amani’s home and starting a fight with their friends and family over Black Lives Matter. This escalates to the point of Karen telling guests at the party that black people who aren’t happy in America should ‘go back to Africa.’ Eventually, Karen extends her campaign to having Malik pulled over and arrested by her brother who uses the opportunity to assault him and blame Malik for the assault, despite the fact that his rookie cop partner was an unwilling witness to the events.

Karen isn’t much of a movie. It has structure, it has actors, but everything in Karen merely resembles a motion picture. The cold hard reality of Karen is a mercenary attempt by the filmmakers to capitalize on the popular media construct of the ‘Karen,’ shorthand for entitled, racist white woman. Karen’s became all the rage in the media of 2020, most notably after a white woman in New York City called police regarding a black man who was bird watching. She claimed to be frightened by the man who was only pointing out that she was violating the law by having her dog off of its leash. The bird watcher filmed the encounter and it soon went viral.

Soon after, Karen’s were everywhere from grocery stores to city pools, phones at the ready, to call 911 the second they saw a black person in their neighborhood. The well documented phenomenon shined a light on the kind of mistreatment that black Americans have dealt with for decades before smartphones began the long march toward leveling the playing field and forcing Americans to confront their own prejudices.

In many ways, the Karen phenomenon was a necessary evil in 2020 as Black Lives Matter rose to prominence. The Karen meme became a rallying point for those who needed a way to demonstrate the roots of discrimination and how they can take hold in even the most seemingly placid circumstances. It may not have done white women actually named Karen any favors but it provided a cultural landmark for the kinds of microaggressions that black people have lived with for decades.

What a shame it is then to watch the movie Karen and see the phenomenon brought so shoddily to life. Karen the movie is an utter disaster of poorly conceived themes and incidences, straw-man arguments and terrible acting. You can almost smell the sweaty desperation of the producers and director Coke Daniels as they rushed their way through making Karen before the meme tailed off and our culture found new ways to associate racism and white entitlement.

Poor Taryn Manning does what she can with the limited role of Karen but she’s a punchline before she can even get out a line of dialogue. Manning’s Karen clearly has mental health issues that extend well beyond the bounds of simply being a racist. She’s basically psychotic without an ounce of self restraint or the ability to read basic social cues. Having the Karen meme associated with a character who is clearly not well mentally undercuts the truth of what the meme stands for, the white people who don’t believe they are racist but enact racism nonetheless.

Somehow, this 86 minute movie, Karen, has less nuance than a Facebook meme. Accidentally or incidentally tying the Karen meme to someone who is mentally ill is a complete strikeout for the filmmakers. They’re failure to understand why Karen became a cultural flash-point is an accidental admission that their movie was never intended to be anything more than a crass and opportunistic attempt to cash in on the widespread cultural cache of the meme.

But there are other issues at play in Karen the movie as well. One of the actors, whose name I don’t want to say so as not to be too unkind, is so awful at acting that it becomes poignant. The character is the secondary villain of the movie and he is written poorly but even if the character had been written well, it’s clear that this poor man was not up giving the character any life. The script does him no favors by crafting a modest backstory that is more interesting than anything actually in the movie.

Karen has no flow or sense of pace, the series of incidents are artlessly strung together and the ending is a tornado of thriller cliches, one more predictable and silly than the next. Even if Taryn Manning and Jasmine Burke were giving the best performances of their respective careers they could not possibly overcome the complete lack of ambition and care that went into the creation of Karen. The foul stench of commercially capitalizing on a genuine social ill is inescapable and the poor actors are victims of the mercenary effort.

Karen will be available for streaming rental services and in some theaters as of September 3rd, 2021.