Carey Williams and Kristen Dávila return with a feature-length adaptation of their short film, “Emergency,” which won both the Special Jury Prize at Sundance and the Grand Jury Prize at SXSW in 2018.
Kunle (Donald Elise Watkins) and his best friend, Sean (RJ Cyler), are polar opposites. Kunle has his head in the books, determined to get into Princeton, while Sean is on the lookout for epic Spring Break parties. One evening, before a big night out, they return to their apartment to pre-game and discover a drunk, semi-conscious White female (Maddie Nichols) on the floor. Too busy on his videogame, Carlos (Sebastian Chacon), their roommate, didn’t see or hear her wander in through the unlocked door. Kunle suggests they proceed by the book and phone the cops; Sean is acutely aware of the optics of the situation (two Black men, one Latino man, and a passed-out white woman). They decide to load her up into Sean’s van and take her somewhere safe while the unknown woman’s sister, Maddy (Sabrina Carpenter), tries to track her down.
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In his Sundance “Meet the Director” segment, Williams described the film as “a college comedy, but really a love story between two friends, Kunle and Sean”—a friendship partly inspired, he says, by the polarised relationship he has with his own brother. As The Playlist’s Robert Daniels noted in his review: “It’s the unbreakable friendship between Kunle and Sean, the ways their time together, good or bad in college, will mark how they see the world, and how the world sees them, forever, that makes Williams’ “Emergency” an elaborate, chaotically hilarious, intensely terrifying journey worth taking.”
For more behind-the-scenes details about how Williams and Dávila adapted their short, how COVID affected the casting process, and how the George Floyd protests reshaped Williams’ vision, check out The Playlist’s full interview with Williams here.
Amazon Studios will release “Emergency” in theaters on May 20, and on Prime Video on May 27. Watch the new Red-band trailer below.