TYREL: A Bold Portrayal Of Race & Masculinity

Who hasn’t been at a party where you’re clearly the outsider? The punch tastes particularly bad that night and you end up exchanging only pleasantries with everyone, but the conversations always stop there, followed by an awkward silence and the eventual drifting away, maybe them even pretending to see someone they know as an excuse to escape the awkwardness.

You begin to wonder if maybe there’s something wrong with you, maybe they are somehow against you, silently resenting you. Before 11pm, you’re about ready to pull out your tinfoil hat, because you have at least a hundred conspiracy theories about that party and the people at it.

This is exactly where we find Tyler in Sebastián Silva’s new film. But let us rewind a bit.

We’ve All Been There

Tyler embarks on a lad’s weekend with his buddy Johnny (the always great Christopher Abbott) at a remote cabin. It doesn’t take long for Tyler to figure out that he is the only black man in the group. But it’s all fine right, these guys aren’t racist, they’re good white people, they’re cool. You know what’s worse than a bunch of white guys? A bunch of drunken white guys. One of them accidentally calls Tyler ‘Tyrel’, hence the name of the film. Tyler is faced with two days’ worth of microaggressions and becomes more and more angry, aggressive and suspicious of his friends.

There’s a lot to unpack in Silva’s film. It’s mean and lean at 86 minutes but packs a massive punch. Surprisingly, nothing really happens. The guys got to a cabin, get drunk and… that’s it. There aren’t heightened points in the little plot Silva offers us, no one is in mortal danger nor is there a big showdown at the end. Tyrel inevitably will draw comparisons with Jordan Peele’s debut Get Out because they both deal with race and the lone black man in a sea of whiteness, but Tyrel plays a very different game and aims for a different conclusion, if any logical or satisfactory conclusion at all. This is far from cathartic; steer clear if you want a plot-filled, generic thriller. Do stay if you fancy a film you can talk about for days on end.

What Silva does brilliantly is bring us right in the middle of the action inside the cabin. He frames his subjects messily, but tightly, with a handheld camera. It’s at times chaotic and the camera can’t always quite keep up with the lads, but that’s what gives Tyrel such a spontaneous vibe. There are some fantastic moments which feel unscripted, free and real. Just guys hanging out. White men in the wild, in their natural habitat, surrounded by booze.

The film is at its best when it lets the camera follow Tyler navigating the potentially hostile environment he’s in. He’s constantly negotiating his stance and place within the group. Although Tyrel is being marketed as a thriller, it’s more clearly a drama. It’s painfully familiar when portraying those awkward moments within a group and how we interpret other people’s actions and intentions. It accurately portrays the universal sense of paranoia we all feel at times, while also being truly specific about the racial microaggressions Tyler encounters.

Race As Performance

Get your tinfoil hats ready lads, we’re about to dive in deep at what Silva may or may not be going for with Tyrel. Early scenes really establish Tyler’s discomfort within the group. One of the guys calling him Tyrel is only the beginning. During a game of accents, someone suggests a ‘black’ accent and immediately Tyler’s internal alarm starts ringing loud. It’s all innocent though. Right?

The next day, some more white dudes arrive. I can’t tell them apart really, none of them are given any other personality than offensively and irritatingly white. Tyler finds a friend in the new arrival Alan, who seems to be the only to confront the elephant in the room and call out Tyler’s race and the hilarity of the situation. It’s refreshing for Tyler who has been internally wondering whether he should read something into this or not. Much of Jason Mitchell’s brilliant performance here is internalised, he only works with small manners and tiny facial twitches, but boy, does he get his point across. It’s a subtle performance, but one that shouldn’t be dismissed because it’s not theatrical.

What is striking about Tyrel is how it suggests, or in fact, questions race as a performance. The aforementioned black accent and getting Tyler’s name wrong is just the beginning for the difficult and complex portrayal of race politics in Silva’s film. What’s important here is that these guys aren’t racist. At least they don’t want, or mean, to be. If anything, they’re aggressively trying not to be racist, which makes race even more relevant within the group and in Tyler’s head. It’s easy to see how Silva treats the group’s interpretation of blackness as a performance, but there’s also much to be said about the whiteness represented in the film.

Whiteness also becomes a performance, which seems to be fuelled into extremes by alcohol consumption. The film is clearly critical of the white guys’ assumption that Tyler’s blackness is something external, something that can be learned and performed. Even Alan, played by Michael Cera, jokes about being black after donning a black wet suit, the film clearly further poking fun at the notion of race being something that can be switched on or off, put on or taken off.

Silva’s perception of whiteness is loud and brash, invasive. The guys here, while never hostile, always stand a bit too close, look a bit too long, give the side-eye. While questioning whether race can be performed, Silva also criticizes it by showing Tyler’s resistance and how uncomfortable it all makes him. Being asked to perform or being questioned makes Tyler visibly irritated so he decides to masquerade in a way. By consuming large amounts of booze, he hopes to connect with the other guys, become a part of their group. It does not go well at all. Ultimately the film (rightly) rejects the idea of race as performance, but it does have fun experimenting with it.

Tyrel: Conclusion

Silva’s film is a bold little movie, which might still prove too hard to crack for some. With virtually no plot and very little character development, Tyrel works best as an examination of masculinity and race. It’s fascinating and Silva is smart enough to let the camera just observe his subjects and let the audience make their own conclusions about what’s unfolding on screen.

Tyrel is not a perfect film, but then again, what is. It doesn’t quite manage to build any kind of momentum and falls a bit flat. While all the cast, especially Jason Mitchell, do fine work, the script doesn’t give them much to work with. Characters are painted with wide strokes rather than intimately drawn. Mitchell is endlessly watchable and magnetic as the lead and manages to make his performance nuanced and even quite fun. There’s much to say about the film and the film has a lot to say about race and masculinity, but it never offers any easy or straight answers for the audience.

What did you make of Tyrel’s race politics? Is it important for films to be a medium in which filmmakers can experiment with representation?

Tyrel was released on December 5th, 2018 in the US. It’s currently available to stream on Amazon Prime, Youtube and Vudu.