Review: Chinonye Chukwu’s TILL : Released Oct 1 '22

Emmett Louis Till (Jalyn Hall) and Mamie Till-Mobley (Danielle Deadwyler)

Till on IMDb

 When I first received the email invitation from Universal with the subject **First Look Screening Invite** - Chinonye Chukwu’s TILL I was not impressed. I knew the story of Emmett Till a 14-year-old African American boy who was abducted, tortured, and lynched in Mississippi in 1955, after being accused of offending a white woman. I didn’t want to see what I believed would be its violence re-enacted – no matter how noble the intent. 

Having just read Paterson Joseph’s The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho I very much agreed with the point made in its introductory Author’s Note, which I paraphrase here along with my emphasis:

 

To the expectations of the [viewer] who awaits a [film] filled with whips and curses and rapes and murders of Black People by White People …… you will not find much to please you here. 

 

I never went to Django Unchained or 12 Years A Slave and I turned The Harder They Come off after a few minutes. I didn’t want see any of the racial violence, the blood, the gore, the pain. I don’t do, what to me, are exploitation movies packed with gratuitous bloody violence. I do not wish to see graphic ‘murders of Black People by White People’ no matter how just or significant the film maker’s cause. 

 

So, my immediate response was to decline but my partner liked the idea of a night back in London town at the movies, especially invited by Universal to a screening. So, very reluctantly I accepted the invitation.

 

I was so pleased I took her advice. TILL is a brilliant movie with deep emotional messages in almost every scene. 

 

From the opening we’re introduced to impish, playful Emmett Louis Till (Jalyn Hall) with his teenage world view and his loving mother, Mamie Till-Mobley (Danielle Deadwyler) full of love and concern that he should do the right thing. Their relationship is at the heart of this movie – a mother for her only son – a son wanting to be a young man – and her need to protect him from all the deadly perils of 1950s America that lay in waiting for Black men. We see the joy, the love, the hurt the pain through his mother’s reactions and emotions. 

 

TILL shows how she maintains her dignity under pressure from the Whites who want to destroy her reputation and her story, just as they had physically destroyed her son, but she is emotionally strong, fighting for a greater cause than the Southern Whites will ever know or comprehend - justice for her son, born of her love for her only child. 

 

I was emotionally exhausted at the end of this movie. 

 

It’s the movie of a 1955 incident which resonates to this day. You can clearly see how Emmett’s death can be seen as a galvanizing moment that helped lead to the creation of the civil rights movement. Sadly, it contains civil rights messages that resonate today almost seventy years later – Black voter suppression, the rewriting of history in favour of Whites things which are happening even today. 

 

The central story of TILL, a White woman - Carolyn Bryant - lying about a Black man’s supposed inappropriate behaviour has an equivalent today but this time a much happier outcome for the Blackman. In 2021 the New York Times reported a White woman called the police in Central Park claiming she was being attacked by a Black man, he filmed the whole incident showing she was clearly lying he, unlike Emmitt survived to tell his story. 

TILL is a movie the world must see. Not just to make manifest the racial violence that continues to this day in America seen in the death of George Floyd but also to make real that force of nature that is the unconditional love of a mother for her son.