Cinema: Brutality and devastating grief in superb drama Till

It’s difficult to believe 2023 is going to offer us many films more powerful than Till, the heart-breaking, harrowing, grim tale of the brutal murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till, the black boy lynched for whistling at a white woman in Money, Mississippi in 1955.

The piece is told through the eyes of his devoted mother Mamie Till-Mobley, played by Danielle Deadwyler who gives an astonishing central performance, combining grief so raw it is almost unwatchable with a steely determination that her son’s death was going to change things.

And indeed it did. Thanks to her courage, the murder became a lightning rod in the Civil Rights Movement – all thanks to the moment she finally saw his corpse, retrieved from a river some time after his death. His body was so disfigured, so bloated, so unrecognisable that she resolved the whole world was going to see “what they did to my boy.” She decided on an open-coffin funeral – and then had the courage to travel south to testify at what shamefully passed as the trial of his killers.

The film opens by establishing the close bond between mother and son (Jalyn Hall) as they sing along to a song in the car in their home city of Chicago. Emmett is a bright, confident – perhaps over-confident – 14-year-old and that’s what worries his mother. He is about to head down to Mississippi to stay with his cousins, and Mamie knows he’s going to have to conduct himself very differently down there. Deadwyler gives us a powerful sense of Mamie’s foreboding as she waves him goodbye, and it isn’t long before her worst fears are realised.

Emmett doesn’t make the adjustments – and the point is why on earth should he? His cheekiness to a white woman in a shop becomes effectively his death sentence. The woman’s family come for him at night, abducting him at gunpoint. He is never again seen alive.

It’s the most brutal of stories, but the brilliance of its film is the manner of its telling. We don’t see the killing. Instead, we see its impact – Mamie’s devastating grief. Brilliant too is the film’s restraint. It could easily have been an angry rant; instead it lets the fury simmer and grow in the viewer throughout.

Inevitably, initially for Mamie it’s a personal matter, but the film beautifully shows how she is pulled into the public spotlight. A widowed single mother and the only black woman working for the Air Force in Chicago, she becomes an outspoken activist for the NAACP advocating for social justice and education.

You watch it wondering why on earth this story hasn’t been made into a film before, but maybe it was just waiting for its moment and that moment is now, exactly 20 years after her death. Directed by Chinonye Chukwu with a screenplay by Michael Reilly & Keith Beauchamp and Chukwu, it is a superb piece of film-making, measured in its depiction of brutality and grief and all the more powerful for that. It’s certainly not an easy watch, but it’s a brilliant one.