Marcus Flemmings’ latest feature White Guilt was one of a number of horror films that screened at the 2025 Raindance Film Festival, an edition in which the genre offerings were particularly strong; other selections in the same strand included hyper-stylised giallo Saturnalia, body horror Thinestra, and Robert Louis Stevenson adaptation Snatchers. Over the course of the past nine years, prolific Londoner Flemmings has directed four other features—Reach!, Blonde. Purple, Palindrome and Six Rounds—and has also written and produced Before Nikkah, a film directed by White Guilt's cinematographer Haider Zafar.
White Guilt sees a group of white, wealthy (and presumably quite bored) millennials board a bus to an ex-plantation; each has paid a not inconsiderable sum to experience an inversion of the scenario that once played out on this property. Thus, these white people act as slaves, while several black masters mete out harsh treatment to their charges. The lines appear to be clearly drawn, until one of the last members to join the programme, the mixed-race Sally (Temica Thompson), threatens to derail the dynamic; it's quite obvious from the masters' faces that this is the first time that someone of this ethnicity has signed up for the event.
How the masters respond to this conundrum is quite predictable, as they double down on punishing Sally, a process which culminates in a startlingly brutal scene that proves that this whole setup is far removed from the realm of cosplay. Rattled, the members of the group realise they've underestimated the severity of this immersive experience, and one of the cohort, David (Theo Watt), is on the brink of using a gun he smuggled in; David plans on defending Ellie (Freya Crompton), who, despite having been threatened with sexual violence, wants no such protection from this would-be white knight (pun intended).
It transpires that David is descended from the onetime owners of the plantation, but this only partly explains his presence in the group, as there's an even more personal reason for his being there. This UK production—which, it should be said, features the occasional wobbly accent—sees the south of England stand in for the southern US, to good effect, and there's a universality to the tricky question it poses: how, exactly, should we deal with racial guilt? The coruscating White Guilt may not offer a solution, but it makes it clear that the answer does not lie in enrolling in a circus like this, which degrades everyone involved.
