Written and Directed by Sebastián Silva, Tyrel follows the solitary black man on a weekend birthday party of only men and heavy drinking. His name is Tyler, played by Jason Mitchell. He joins his friend, played by Christopher Abbott, on a trip to the Catskills with several people he doesn’t know, and they are all white men.
The handheld camera and sharp cuts by Alexis Zabé along with the editing by Sofía Subercaseaux and Jennifer Lame sustain the perilous tone.
Although Tyler welcomed, he can’t help but feel uneasy around a close-knit group of white guys. The combination of alpha male posturing include large quantities of alcohol starts to get out of hand, and Tyler’s precarious situation starts to feel like a nightmare.
The movie shot with a handheld style probing subtext and body language conjures an undeniable underlying tension of the American climate. The story evolved from Silva’s observation of racial tensions in a strictly male setting.
On a crisp snowy winter’s day, Tyler and his friend John, two young restaurateurs from New York City, push a car along a back road high in the Catskills Mountains. They’re on the way to a weekend getaway to celebrate the birthday of Pete, played by Caleb Landry Jones, one of John’s old friends, at a cabin in the woods.
Tyler needs the excursion, even though he will be among mostly strangers, because the home he shares with his Puerto Rican girlfriend, played by Ann Dowd, is packed with her visiting family, along with her ailing, elderly mother to whom she is devoted.
Having an empty gas tank is only the first in a series of discomforting moments Tyler encounters and causes over the next 48 hours. Right off the bat, one of his new acquaintances mishears his name as “Tyrel,” a subtle but significant alteration that both gives Sebastián Silva’s latest film its title and sets up a theme of racially-tinged, innuendos that leads the good-natured Tyler towards a shaky mental edge.
The Chilean Silva, who has lived in New York for the past 17 years, approaches the subject of race as an outsider to American culture, but an insightful writer of alienation. The story unfolds by capturing natural moments with the talented ensemble cast.
The cast, which includes Michael Cera, represents a range of electric and sometimes eccentric personalities, expands on a situation Silva initially observed while vacationing in Cuba with a friend of his. They came across a group of American tourists, drunk and in their mid-20s, and all but one of them white.
“It was probably my imagination, but the black guy seemed alienated. Alienation is a topic that interests me, and I saw it right there. And at that moment, this guy’s alienation was linked to the color of his skin. Racism feels like it’s always timely in America. It never ceases to be an issue, and that was part of it this moment. Something profound was happening there,” explains Silva.
Later, Silva’s friend went to his cabin in the Catskills to celebrate another friend’s birthday. “And they were all white, and one of them was black, but there was nothing awkward about their dynamic. At the very end of their weekend, they took a selfie and the black dude was the one who took it. That selfie also inspired this film. The mixture of that moment with what we had witnessed and talked about in Cuba made a case for something compelling, so I explored it,” recalls Silva.
“I wanted Tyrel to be the movie that speaks for the middle-class black guy,” he says, “the black guy that wasn’t a thug. The black guy that’s like most of the black guys out there these days. There are a lot of black guys that are trying to be successful and do things in their lives, but they get in the situations that are awkward for them that they don’t know how to handle.”
Although the film deals with tension arising from racial difference, nothing about the story, or the characters, is purely black or white. Instead, the movie shows a lot of layers, so the story is not directly in the racial issue. “I’m not completely sure these guys mean to be cruel or to look down on Tyler. Black people have been put in such a generic box. So, Tyler’s not going to be a saint and he’s not going to be a victim. I don’t want to have clear victims or clear victimizers. I don’t want to have the bad guy and the good guy. I don’t want a conversation about taking sides. I want to make people think about what they witness. This movie will live in every American’s own set of prejudices and opinions. I want people to be somehow troubled by the conclusions they come to on their own,” reckons Silva.