YMMV / Karen

• Audience-Alienating Premise: Very few audience members out there are likely to take a horror movie about an extremely sensitive and complicated issue like racism seriously when the main antagonist is an openly racist "karen" who's literally named Karen.
• Anvilicious: As expected of a film whose villain is an Obnoxious Entitled Housewife named Karen, the movie is not at all subtle with its themes of racism being bad. The first shot of the movie is Karen washing away Black Lives Matter graffiti and it doesn't get any less subtle from there.
• Don't Shoot the Message: While many people do agree with the movie’s message, the movie’s poor quality and lack of subtlety bungle it to the point where some critics said they would’ve mistaken it for a Stealth Parody in favor of the Karen if it weren’t made by a black director for a black network.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Karen's last name is Drexler. That technically means that she, a racist, ironically shares her last name with a black NBA All-Star.^note In this case, Clyde Drexler.
  • When there's a mental health expert at the US Dept. of Veteran Affairs by the same name^note an MD, a psychiatrist,perhaps?, one who has written academic papers no less^note About drug use and its effects, no less, that makes the movie counterpart even funnier.
• Narm: The trailer alone was so ridiculously on-the-nose (the titular villain even has a Confederate flag-themed soap dispenser!) that it had many people mistaking it for a Saturday Night Live parody.
• Questionable Casting: In addition to the film's overall over-the-top use of racism for a horror movie about an Obnoxious Entitled Housewife literally named Karen, the fact that Karen herself is portrayed by Taryn Manning, best known for her role as religious fanatic Pennsatucky in Orange Is the New Black, makes what was probably intended as an Actor Allusion to instead make the film's anviliciousness get cranked up to eleven.
• So Bad, It's Good: Many people watch the film solely to laugh at how hilariously tone-deaf and corny it is and how gloriously it bungles every sensitive topic it tries to touch upon.
• Spiritual Successor: Based on how the plot is about a racist trying to get the subject of said racism out of their living community and it deals with racist cops who cover up crimes for each other, this could easily be viewed as the spiritual successor to Lakeview Terrace, just with the roles now inverted and with two black leads rather than a black woman and a white man. The two villains align almost exactly, with them hating another race based off of a Tragic Backstory and using it as a Freudian Excuse to commit horrendous acts against innocent people.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • At one point the film implies that Karen might have a Villainous Crush on Malik. It only ever comes up in one scene and she shows no sign of being attracted to him after. Given what the film was going for, this could have been used as a commentary on the fetishization of black men as studs (or overall about how racists can still express sexual attraction towards the races they're prejudiced against), but the concept is dropped almost immediately after the film brings it up.
  • Karen's children obviously do not share her racist beliefs and even get along pretty well with Imani and Malik in the few scenes they have together, the son's voyeurism notwithstanding. Karen's daughter specifically gets a scene in which she helps Imani pick up trash after her mother callously pushes over Imani's trash can. The scene leads absolutely nowhere and nothing ever comes of the set-up, with Karen's children all but disappearing from the plot later on.
  • When Karen calling the police on a civil rights attorney's son goes viral, her neighborhood's Homeowner's Association revokes her membership due to the bad publicity. Up to this point, though they scoffed at her racist blatherings, they did little to actively curb or punish her toxic behavior; only when she makes headlines do they decide to take action, but only because her presence makes them look bad. This could have highlighted how companies and institutions tend to act on certain social, economic, or political issues not because it's the right thing to do, but instead to maintain their optics. Unfortunately, the film never addresses this.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • Imani. It is made clear that she was the one who wanted to move to the new house, a house that is repeatedly stated she and her husband can barely afford. Not to mention a very large house despite the fact she has no desire to have children. Then it is revealed she works as a blogger, which means she could literally do her job anywhere with an internet connection whereas her husband now has to commute to get to work, which causes him unnecessary stress that he uses marijuana to self medicate, which gives Karen another thing to harass them over.
  • Malik tends to fall into this as well. Even though the film makes a point of him being a victim of racial prejudice, he himself make a few iffy remarks against white people as a group, which is rather hypocritical on his part. One example is when he declares that "[he and Imani] ain't running from white people" as he proclaims that they stand their ground against Karen, implying that they are some sort of collective adversary to confront or run away from.^note Even more baffling is that Karen's (also white) children are genuinely open towards Imani and Malik, with Sarah helping Imani pick up trash and Kyle playing basketball with Malik; Sarah even confides in Imani that she disagrees with her mother's racist outlook. In casting white people in such a negative light, Malik indirectly insulted these kids who were actively friendly towards them and lumped them in with actual racists (e.g., Karen and Mike). All in all, it's troubling when the only reason to side with the protagonists is because the antagonist is so exaggeratedly evil that most people would look like saints in comparison.
• The Woobie: Karen's daughter, Sarah. Despite her mother's rotten personality, Sarah is a sweet and friendly little girl who goes out of her way to help Imani clean trash off her front lawn after her mother toppled Imani's garbage bin over out of spite. She opposes her mother's racist attitude but is clearly afraid of her, to the point where she hides that she has a black boyfriend at school out of fear of punishment. The few interactions we do see between Karen and Sarah serve to justify the latter's fears, with one of them having Karen yell at Sarah to get back in the house when she finds her literally cleaning up her mother's mess. To make matters worse, we never see what happened to Sarah and her older brother Kyle after their mother and uncle Mike perished in the film's climax; one can only hope they landed in a nice foster home or in the hands of kinder relatives afterwards.

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