★★★★☆
One of the most terrifying movie moments in recent memory occurs on the steps of a Mississippi grocery store midway through this powerful historical drama. Here, in August 1955, the baby-faced African-American teenager Emmett Till (Jalyn Hall), while smiling cheekily at the pretty white store owner Carolyn Bryant (Haley Bennett), puts his lips together and releases a short, soft wolf whistle.
And that’s it. That’s the moment. That’s all there is. Yet the director and co-writer Chinonye Chukwu, working with a talented and mostly flawless cast (including Whoopi Goldberg as Emmett’s grandmother), has established the film’s venomously racist Jim Crow-era milieu so profoundly that the exchange bristles with shock and sickening dread. We understand that Emmett Till’s life, as a result of that one seemingly banal and wordless gesture, is over.
The film wisely keeps Till’s subsequent murder at the hands of Bryant’s husband and acquaintances off camera. We instead hear it, in screams and moans (he’s tortured in a barn), and eventually see the evidence of it in the boy’s horribly battered and disfigured body and photographs of the same that were bravely used as a pushback against oppression by Till’s mother, Mamie (Danielle Deadwyler). The film is ultimately her story, detailing her radical progress from caring, overprotective and slightly neurotic single mother to crusading civil rights campaigner.
Like Chukwu’s previous knockout, Clemency, this is a project that hangs on the intensity of its central performance. And Deadwyler is a revelation. Previously notable as Zoe Saldana’s sister in the Netflix series From Scratch, she is monumental in the role. For most of the film she is held in huge dignified close-ups by Chukwu’s probing camera before eventually unleashing torrents of emotion in brief and devastating outbursts. In the scene where she first sees her son’s coffin she collapses against it, wailing: “My boy, my only boy! Get him out of the box! He can’t breathe!”
It’s an easy awards season performance, as powerful as those of the best actress frontrunners Cate Blanchett and Michelle Williams. Nominations, at the very least, are due.
12A, 130min
In cinemas
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