Not long into They Cloned Tyrone (2023), the lead character, a small-time, tough-as-nails drug dealer named Fontaine (John Boyega), is pumped so full of bullets by some rivals that we, and he, can barely believe it when he wakes up the next morning with his skin — and mortality — intact. He’s confident that what happened the night before wasn’t a dream, and when he does some investigating on his own — accompanied by a frenemy pimp, Slick (Jamie Foxx), and one of the sex workers, Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris), in his stable — the slow trickling in of reveals confirm that something very strange is going on in the Black-majority, economically depressed neighborhood where they all live.

The first hour or so of They Cloned Tyrone is a funny, interest-piquingly mysterious pleasure. Its jesting tone, paired with the darkness of the central enigma driving its trio of sleuths, made me think of it like a more sinister riffing on, say, the Nancy Drew books even before they’re openly commented on by the characters as “missionary-position, vanilla shit” compared to what they find out is going on. (Rows and rows of the series’ trademark yellow-bound editions line some of the shelving in Yo-Yo’s childhood bedroom.) Boyega is an affecting combo of merciless and sensitive as Fontaine, though the movie’s real standouts are Foxx and Parris in larger-than-life parts whose comic relief increasingly feels needed as the creepy reality of their situation starts to set in. “I ain’t with this X-Files shit!,” Yo-Yo will exclaim at one point with the sort of charming exasperation we’ll come to love her character for.

How director Juel Taylor, who also co-wrote They Cloned Tyrone alongside Tony Rettenmaier, fleshes out that situation leaves something to be desired, though. Of a piece with Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You (2018) and Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2016) in how it makes extra nightmarish how much power white people have over Black well-being, it poses a frightening scenario — that, not to give too much of the narrative away, there’s a disturbing cloning and surveillance operation taking place in the neighborhood — without digging too deeply into it. It opts more often for splashes of too-literal exposition than frightening set pieces or dark comedy that further underline the surreality of what’s going on.

They Cloned Tyrone’s thinness clashes with its more-than-two-hour running time, but its fundamental imaginativeness gets it pretty far. So does its aesthetic. Cinematographer Ken Seng gives everything a purgatorially foggy sheen redolent of one of John Carpenter’s 1980s horror features. Franco-Giacomo Carbone’s production design has an aversion to a singular time period that at first seems like a compelling stylistic choice before we come to realize that it’s really an indication that the characters are living in a neither-here-nor-there place from which we hope they can manage to escape.

Photo credit: Parris Lewis/Netflix