It’s never just hair. Hair is part of our identity, individually and culturally. For Black women, who have been mocked and discriminated against because of their hair for centuries, this is especially true. Bundles is a thrill ride that explores what happens when one Black girl gets tired of the teasing.

Morgan (Yavonna Harris) is frustrated. Her former best friend, Maria (Layla Khepri), hurls racist insults at her to entertain her new friends. She’s been accepted to her dream art school, but doesn’t have the money to pay for it. And with her father long dead from cancer, she, her sister, and their mother have to work extra hard to make ends meet. When a senior photo screw up threatens to push Morgan over the edge, her friends come up with a plan: Maria seems to like making fun of Morgan’s hair. Wouldn’t it be a shame if Maria lost her hair?

When stealing Maria’s hair turns out more successfully than any of them could’ve imagined, the friends get an idea. What if they cut and sell the hair of people all over the D.C. area? Thus begins what seems like a string of wacky hijinks – until they cut the wrong hair.

As one might hope from a movie about hair, the hair, makeup, and costumes in the film are great. So much care is put into showcasing Black beauty, which is sorely underrepresented in Western media. As a white person, I am the absolute last person who should be commenting on Black representation, but I can recognize that it’s severely lacking. Bundles is one small step toward rectifying this, and visually, it does well.

Unfortunately, the movie falters in other ways. The acting ranges in quality from great to middling, with a lot of awkwardness that makes some scenes unpleasant to sit through. Things that aren’t supposed to be funny end up being incredibly funny, and hastily edited montages make it easy to blink and miss important information in what should be a relatively casual viewing experience. And, to put it honestly, Bundles is a movie that defies easy categorization. It oscillates between serious and seriously goofy, to the point where it kinda shoots itself in the foot. It pulls off silly crime dramedy well, but it shifts too much in tone toward the end. It feels like the movie starts and ends in a different genre, and in doing so undermines its message, making the overall effect that of a clunkily put together PSA video, just longer. I really enjoyed most of the movie, which makes it all the more disappointing that the ending was such a letdown.

The good bits of Bundles are great, but the disappointments are enough that I hesitate to recommend it. It has no release date as of yet, but unless some last-minute edits are made, I foresee this one ending up lost in a shuffle of free-to-watch titles on a streaming service somewhere.

6 out of 10