Parents' Guide to The Night They Came Home

This is truly a shockingly bad movie, completely unaware of how institutionalized, literal, and cultural racism has affected the history of the United States. Save your time and stay away from this dreadful film. There's absolutely nothing redeeming about The Night They Came Home, except for the fact that maybe because it's one of the worst and most obliviously racist "modern" movies ever made, it might serve as a tool for teaching. The acting is horrible, the depiction of the late 1800s "Wild West" is laughably inaccurate and unrealistic, and the script and dialogue are so transparently pro-White that it's hard to conceive how this film got made. The film is solely focused on making every White character (and Whiteness) heroic, just, good, and righteous. So, there were no "bad," racist, or violent White people in the late 1800s?

Also, the film explicitly depicts Black and Indigenous men in stereotypical, racist, and inappropriately irresponsible ways, ways that American film has been doing since its inception. Further, the way the film is so clearly oblivious to all this and what it represents is simply depressing and beyond comprehension. This film so clearly is written and made by and for a particular audience. The perspective of this film is horribly racist and egregiously offensive. In other words, it's literally a modern retelling of 1915's Birth of a Nation, a film that inaugurated the depiction of Black men as criminal, violent, and sexually deviant, but without meaning to be.