Laundry (2025) Movie Drinking Game
Take a Drink: whenever someone plays an instrument
Take a Drink: for apartheid absurdities
Take a Drink: for chaos at the laundry
Take a Drink: whenever the subject of America comes up
Do a Shot: for face-to-face racism
By: Henry J. Fromage (Two Beers) –
The horrors of Apartheid may feel like their from a different time, but there are too many for which it is a living memory, and its after-effects still reverberate.
Laundry follows one South African family which owns a laundry in a “whites-only area”, which we grow to learn has only stayed this way by the father’s ability to navigate an arcane and arbitrary bureaucracy- one whose arbitrariness means it is always subject to change.
A Toast
As you’ll see from the outset, director Zamo Mkhwanazi’s handsome lighting and color choices and nice usage of contrast makes this film’s 1968 setting-appropriate details pop. This is a vibrant community living vibrant lives despite all of the restrictions on them. The son is a musician and one conflict is making a decision between following his musical dreams or take up the mantle of the laundry.
It’s a fair question as to which is really the safer path in this environment, as Mkhwanazi underlines the absurd and dehumanizing hoops black South Africans had to jump through during Apartheid rule. The laundry only survives and thrives via bribes, which are not even the assurance they used to be, whereas becoming a musician means enduring the many specific limitations of Apartheid on dangerously inspirational arts, or seeking to leave it. These are the compromises one makes in a society suffering from bone-deep corruption.
When the son starts to take steps towards joining a popular local band that has a chance to go to America for a show, he’s faced with indignities like a fully-naked group medical inspection just to get the Dompass- a work/travel permit just for within South Africa, but a prerequisite pass to a neighboring country, where only there one can apply for a passport to travel abroad. All paths are precarious.
Kudos to the cast, which delivers superb acting all around, and the music of the film, which pulsate with raw feeling- screaming to be free.
Beer Two
**SPOILERS**
For someone who was so clearly technically proficient and had read the industrial dryer manual front-to-back, how did the daughter not know what would happen when she put her extremely flammable communion dress in there? At first I though this was done on purpose, but the ensuing scenes seem to imply it was very much otherwise. If it was, then shoring up motivations to do something self-destructive like this earlier would have gone a long way towards deepening such a narrative choice.
Verdict
Laundry is a strikingly-shot, blood-boiling story of life under the soul-crushing vagaries of Apartheid’s racist bootheel.
