Queen & Slim is not a love story. Not that it’s marketed as one, but its trailer certainly teases a romantic spark. The movie’s reality is far more somber.

The drama follows Angela (Jodie Turner-Smith, Nightflyers, The Last Ship) and Ernest (Daniel Kaluuya, Get Out, Black Panther) in the aftermath of a first Tinder date gone horribly wrong: a cop pulls over the black couple and the situation escalates` toward the worst extreme. Angela ends up shot in the leg, and the white cop ends up dead. Angela and Ernest, or Queen and Slim as the title dubs them—their names are not revealed to the audience until the film’s end—take off on the run in a white Honda Civic with a license plate reading TRUSTGOD.

The film is a new creative venture for both writer and director, as a feature screenplay debut for Lena Waithe (Bones, The Chi) and a feature directorial debut for Melina Matsoukas (Insecure, but best known for Beyoncé music videos). Queen & Slim both stuns and disappoints. With sweeping visuals, a clunky-at-times script, and more than one jarring transition, Waithe and Matsoukas shine a spotlight on black tragedy. In the end, their film works more as a piece of performance art or extended slavery metaphor than it does as anything else.

After Angela and Ernest take off with the murder weapon in hand, they decide to go to Angela’s uncle in New Orleans. She says he can help them. They drive from Ohio, through Kentucky, where a close encounter with an off-duty sheriff leaves them even more on-edge, to Uncle Earl’s house, where they transform into new versions of themselves: Ernest’s hair shaved close to the head and Angela’s box braids carefully undone to reveal her natural short afro.

Still not safe, they flee through Georgia to Florida where, theoretically, a plane awaits them. Likely having passed through Tennessee and Alabama too along the way, the trek from their Ohio Tinder date to a Florida tarmac takes Ernest and Angela through five former Confederate states. Within this Southern setting, the film’s visuals include wide shots of rural highways set among open fields. This background, while picturesque, reminds the audience of this region’s history regarding people who look like Queen and Slim. Particularly when they drive past a group of incarcerated black men working quite literally in a Louisiana field with a white corrections officer standing over them. Those men are the state’s property—a not-too-subtle reminder of the fate Angela and Ernest are attempting to escape.

Ernest’s license plate urges the audience to trust God, and Matsoukas continuously highlights crosses: hanging around Ernest’s neck, on the wall at Uncle Earl’s house, and hanging from the turquoise Catalina’s rearview mirror, framed by Ernest and Angela as they attempt to complete their escape. Ernest’s faith steadies him as the two fugitives flee across the American South; he finds comfort in some combination of trust in God, luck, and destiny. He says meeting Angela was meant to be, some turn of fate more profound than a woman in need of company after a particularly grim day at work. Angela, as a lawyer, operates in fact and logic more than in any abstract faith. Queen & Slim’s audience—particularly its black audience—may have trouble finding faith in anything in the film. Just before they flee the scene, Angela asks Ernest, “What if they kill us?” To the realist, this feels more like a question of when than of what if. Our America would never let two black cop-killers live free.

Trust God echoes uncomfortably In God We Trust, a neat dig at the nation framing the movie’s knife-edge tension. At one point, a young black cop assures his older white comrade that he knows the difference between a human and an animal. This question lies at the crux of United States history. It also lies at the crux of United States present. Who is human, and who is less than? Who has the right to exist freely, and who doesn’t? Queen & Slim’s audience must ask themselves whether the film’s narrative positions Ernest and Angela as human or animal.

The police and the public hunting Angela and Ernest certainly seem to view them as animal. News outlets consistently describe them as “armed and dangerous,” long after they have left any weapons behind. The script makes clear that their main desire is just to live, not to harm anyone. The black folks the pair encounters consistently view them as human. They are provide safety and solace, whether that means a bed to sleep in or a bar in which to dance away their woes. Even when they disagree with the duo’s supposed “cop-killer” stance, they offer help. Help doesn’t come solely from other black people, however. In one of the film’s most pivotal moments, a white couple hide Angela and Ernest underneath their floorboards while a SWAT team storms their home. In contrast to the various allies, Waithe and Matsoukas, though they attempt to paint Angela and Ernest as multidimensional humans, treat their protagonists more as objects: symbols ricocheting from one scenario to another.

By the film’s end, the viewer knows very little about either of their lives. Angela, we know is an attorney, and a good one. We know her mother died in an accident when she was young. We don’t know what really makes her tick. Ernest—he is a complete blank slate. We can guess that he does a construction or contracting job based on the work boots and heavy-duty pants he wears at the film’s opening, but we have no idea who he is, really. Even with captivating performances by both Turner-Smith and Kaluuya, the two leads still read as empty. Angela and Ernest are not fully developed characters, but symbols of something larger than themselves—both in the context of the film’s narrative, as they become the faces of the latest Black Lives Matter protest, and the landscape into which Waithe and Matsoukas’s film is released, a United States that constantly enacts violence against black people.

During their date, Angela tells Ernest that his Tinder profile needs more pictures because pictures are proof that a person exists in the world. The picture of Turner-Smith and Kaluuya that graces the movie posters in black and white—the two actors leaning against the turquoise Catalina—plays an important role at film’s end. The picture, in the same black and white, circulates in-movie across the galvanized country after the film’s deadly conclusion. From t-shirts to city murals, the image becomes insistent proof that Angela and Earnest existed in a nation that would rather forget them, rather they never existed at all—would rather they have died instead of the white cop.

What Queen & Slim itself is proof of is murkier. The film is not proof that police bias exists, nor proof that systemic racism is inescapable. Plenty real-life proof of these phenomena is all around us. If anything, Queen & Slim is proof that the idea of meant-to-be is tenuous at best, especially for people whose very existence is not guaranteed through the end of the night.

Olivia Funderburg studied English and Education Studies at Wellesley College, and now works in children’s publishing in New York City. In her free time, she can be found talking about educational inequality, keeping tabs on Lebron James, and searching bookstore shelves for the next great teen romcom.