by Tim Gordon
Kahlil Joseph, the visionary filmmaker and artist behind Beyoncé’s Lemonade and Flying Lotus’s Until the Quiet Comes, makes a bold and hypnotic transition to narrative feature filmmaking with BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions.
Adapted from his acclaimed multi-channel video installation that debuted at the 2019 Venice Biennale, Joseph’s debut feature defies categorization, part documentary, part experimental collage, and wholly cinematic meditation on Black identity, media, and memory.
More than a film, Terms & Conditions plays like a visual symphony, an immersive, sensory experience that spans 247 years of Black existence across land, sea, and screen. With nonlinear time signatures, layered sound design, and elliptical narrative arcs, Joseph constructs a cinematic language all his own, one rooted in jazz improvisation, digital ephemera, and ancestral reclamation. The result is something radical: a film that moves, not in plot, but in rhythm, equal parts sermon, séance, and broadcast.
Shaunette Renée Wilson anchors the film with a mesmerizing performance that provides much-needed emotional gravity amid Joseph’s swirling abstractions. As a figure who appears to drift between historical periods and symbolic archetypes, Wilson becomes the film’s spiritual compass, her presence grounding us even as the film floats between past, present, and speculative futures. Hope Giselle, in a striking debut, contributes a presence that is less performance and more embodiment, a reflection of the film’s ethos of transformation, transition, and transcendence.
Visually, Terms & Conditions is a feast. Shot with a textured, painterly quality, the film blends archival footage with staged tableaux and stylized vignettes, all edited with hypnotic precision. Joseph conjures the ghosts of Black history and weaves them into modern digital spaces, refracting the Black experience through television screens, surveillance footage, viral videos, and intimate family rituals. Historical figures slip into contemporary avatars. Resistance becomes both a memory and a mode of survival. The narrative, if one dares call it that, unfolds like a prophecy heard in a dream, delivered with a clarity just beyond comprehension.
The film interrogates the systems that define and confine Blackness, be they legal, cultural, media-driven, or metaphysical. The titular “terms and conditions” serve as both an indictment and an inquiry: what does it mean to live under unspoken contracts of existence? Of representation? Of history? Joseph never answers, but instead challenges the viewer to sit with the weight of those questions, resisting the urge to decode and instead asking us to bear witness.
Terms & Conditions will undoubtedly divide audiences. Its refusal to adhere to narrative conventions, its elliptical structure, shifting characters, and non-linear timelines can be alienating. But for viewers willing to surrender to its pulse, the film offers a profound, almost spiritual experience. It is cinema as ritual, as resistance, as remix.
Joseph doesn’t just tell stories; he destabilizes the form itself, forcing us to question how stories are told, by whom, and for what purpose. In a media landscape dominated by conventional biopics and historical dramas, BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions is something altogether rarer: a Black cinematic opus that refuses to conform. It is a work of radical empathy and radical imagination, a bold declaration that Black lives are not just lived, but felt, fractured, remembered, and remixed across centuries.
Grade: B
