Anyone who watches romantic thrillers knows what to expect. This is precisely why we watch. The goal is not to be surprised so much as it is to have our suspicions confirmed. These films promise to reward us for our anticipation. With the rise of Black-led romantic thrillers, however, audiences are often asked to suspend our disbelief in more ways than one. Unlike the increasingly popular, so-called “Black social thrillers,” such as Get Out, Us, and Luce, the Black romantic thriller is rarely authored by Black screenwriters themselves. Thus, these films rarely ask audiences to look closer or engage critically where race, class, gender, and sexuality are concerned. Instead, Black romantic thrillers — the likes of which include Obsessed, When The Bough Breaks, The Perfect Guy, The Intruder, etc. — take part in an especially sinister seduction with regard to genre. Centering narratives of Black women leading idyllic upper-middle-class lives, more often than not, these films allow little to no consideration for the ways race, class, and gender inform one’s exposure to violence and relationship to safety.
As a genre, the thriller hinges on the idea of violence as sensational and temporary rather than pervasive and recurring. Yet, the lives of Black women and girls threaten this very narrative structure. According to a 2017 CDC report, Black women experience domestic violence and homicide at higher rates than any other group in the United States. With these conditions in mind, a romantic thriller with a Black woman lead is perhaps faced with the subversion of the genre itself. After all, the thriller cannot exist without an established narrative of safety. To write about Black women and intimate violence would require a troubling of “safety” as it stands. For failure to do so, the Black romantic thriller, in its efforts to meet the demands of a stifling genre, often struggles to fathom violence without contingency.