Alice begins with a blood-curdling scream. As the film comes into focus, the audience meets Alice (Keke Palmer), an enslaved woman on the run. Before her destination is revealed, the film pulls us back in time to a plantation in rural Georgia. Surrounded by her loved ones, Alice secretly weds a man named Joseph (Gaius Charles) in a darkened cabin. However, no sooner have the newlywed couple said their vows are they beckoned outside by the plantation owner, Paul (Jonny Lee Miller). The audience learns quickly that Paul luxuriates in endless acts of cruelty include sexual and physical violence.
Alice’s world has been depicted in countless films, including Harriet, 12 Years A Slave and, the oddly similar Antebellum. In Alice, first-time filmmaker Krystin Ver Linden painstakingly takes the time to sit in this setting of horrors, depicting everything from iron muzzles to beatings and alarming talks of human breeding. Unfortunately, this adds nothing new to the narratives of this time period.
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