They Cloned Tyrone
2023 · Juel Taylor
For a night when you want entertainment with teeth: laughs, a mystery to pull apart, and something real to argue about afterward. Easy to watch, harder to shake.
What it's about
In a neighborhood called the Glen, a dope dealer, a pimp, and a sex worker keep noticing things that shouldn't be possible — eerie repetitions, people who aren't quite themselves. Following the weirdness leads the reluctant trio toward a vast, clinical operation running beneath their streets, and the suspicion that the everyday textures of their world are instruments of control.
The experience
A conspiracy thriller that's genuinely funny and genuinely unsettling at once — the jokes land fast while a low hum of paranoia keeps building. It moves like a caper but leaves a bruise.
Performances
John Boyega works in a low, wounded register while Jamie Foxx and Teyonah Parris play the comedy at full wattage — the friction between those temperatures is the movie's signature pleasure.
The craft
Juel Taylor and cinematographer Ken Seng shoot digital but grade it like degraded 70s film stock — grain, halation, colors gone slightly rancid — so the whole thing feels beamed in from the blaxploitation era it's riffing on. The retro-funk texture rewards a good screen and speakers.
Why it matters
A standout of the recent wave of Black genre filmmaking that treats conspiracy as metaphor made literal, and a bold calling card for first-time director Juel Taylor.
Reception & legacy: how They Cloned Tyrone was received, argued over, and remembered →
A dope dealer, a pimp, and a sex worker in a neighborhood called the Glen stumble onto evidence that something vast and clinical is operating beneath their streets — and that the everyday textures of their world may be instruments of control. Juel Taylor's debut feature runs blaxploitation iconography through a paranoid sci-fi engine, joining Sorry to Bother You and Us in a modern wave of Black genre filmmaking that treats conspiracy not as fantasy but as metaphor made literal. John Boyega works in a low, wounded register while Jamie Foxx and Teyonah Parris play the comedy at full wattage; the friction between those tones is the film's signature. Taylor and cinematographer Ken Seng shoot digital but grade it to look like degraded 70s film stock — halation, grain, colors gone slightly rancid — so the movie seems beamed in from the era whose politics it's interrogating. Beneath the caper mechanics sits a pointed argument about assimilation, respectability, and who profits when a community is kept asleep.
Lines of influence
- Putney Swope (1969) — Establishes the absurdist Black corporate-satire register where a boardroom conspiracy is played deadpan-comic, the tonal-friction mode Taylor uses to make 'The Company' both funny and sinister.
- Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970) — Codifies the comedic Harlem-detective blaxploitation template — street-level sleuthing, neighborhood vernacular, buried loot — that Tyrone reactivates as its investigative spine.
- Super Fly (1972) — Supplies the dealer-milieu iconography (the coke-block flat, the pusher's swagger, the funk-scored block) that Fontaine's world reproduces then reveals as an engineered set-dressing.
- Coffy (1973) — Provides the exact character grammar Tyrone recasts as archetypes-under-glass: Hill's dealer/pimp/sex-worker triad maps directly onto Fontaine, Slick Charles, and Yo-Yo.
- The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973) — Pioneers the Black paranoid-conspiracy thriller in which systemic control of the community is the covert antagonist, the political engine Tyrone literalizes as underground cloning.
- The Stepford Wives (1975) — Gives the 'replacement to enforce conformity' plot machine — a controlled populace swapped for compliant duplicates, discovered through creeping wrongness in familiar faces.
- Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) — Models the your-neighbor-is-a-copy dread and the paranoid escalation from personal unease to citywide conspiracy that Tyrone's clone reveal runs on.
- They Live (1988) — The blueprint for consumer products as instruments of mass mind-control unmasked by a device — Carpenter's sunglasses become Tyrone's tainted perm cream, grape drink, and fried chicken.
- Undercover Brother (2002) — Directly precedes Tyrone's move of literalizing 'The Man' as an actual clandestine organization while staging the whole thing as blaxploitation pastiche comedy.
- Get Out (2017) — Supplies the social-thriller mechanics — a benign surface concealing a systematized bodily-appropriation scheme against Black people, revealed via a slow procedural of clues.
- Sorry to Bother You (2018) — Named influence: the magic-realist Black satire that hard-swerves mid-film into sci-fi body-horror to unmask corporate dehumanization, sharing Tyrone's comedy-to-horror tonal friction.
- Us (2019) — Named influence: doubles and a hidden underground infrastructure deployed as metaphor for a deliberately engineered underclass — the literal-clones-below-the-streets device Tyrone inherits.
- Atlanta (2016) — Runs the same surreal Black-genre register, letting naturalistic street comedy tip without warning into uncanny horror — the deadpan-into-dread tonal control Taylor deploys scene to scene.
- Bad Hair (2020) — Shares the period-styled Black horror-satire approach, mining a culturally specific beauty ritual (weaves / perm cream) as the vector for a supernatural-systemic threat.
- Vampires vs. the Bronx (2020) — Deploys a genre-monster (vampires ≈ clones) as the metaphor for an organized, hidden erasure of a Black-and-brown neighborhood, uncovered by wisecracking local kids.
- Nope (2022) — Extends the same craft-forward Black-authored genre spectacle, using a digitally-shot image finished for a filmic, period-textured grain rather than clean gloss — kin to Ken Seng's graded-to-film halation look.