Guava Island movie review: Donald Glover unleashes his musical alter ego Childish Gambino in ambitious Amazon film, also starring Rihanna and Black Panther’s Letitia Wright.
A year after it was reported that Donald Glover and Rihanna were working on a secret project together in Cuba, the results are ready to be shown to the world.
Guava Island isn’t the duet album that many would’ve expected, nor is it a concert documentary.
It’s a narrative film – at 55 minutes barely long enough to be called a feature – that adds to the aura of Glover’s alter ego, Childish Gambino, and reasserts his stature as one of America’s foremost creative artistes.
Guava Island, on the surface, appears to be just the sort of passion project that is afforded to filmmakers after massive early success, but upon further inspection reveals itself to be a densely layered work of art.
Glover and his Atlanta director Hiro Murai (who makes his feature debut with Guava Island) present their very unique brand of social and cultural criticism, wrapped as always in a (distractingly) vibrant package.
In Atlanta, they swept away the superficiality that is usually associated with hip-hop, and told a realistic story about what it is like to be a black man in America. Guava Island peels back the layers of artifice that have obscured the world’s vision of the USA, and reveals the ugly truth inside.
Unexpectedly but appropriately, Guava Island is a companion piece to Jordan Peele’s recent horror picture, Us – dense with symbolism and metaphor.
It’s a fable of sorts, about gods and mortals, love and war. “A very, very long time ago, long before the birds, cars, and even coffee beans, the seven gods of the seven lands created the duelling truths: love and war,” Rihanna’s character says in the film’s animated opening segment, before adding, rather sagely, “but wherever there is love, war will follow.”
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