Till review – harrowing yet careful look at a heinous crime and an incredible mother

Chinonye Chukwu’s last film, the 2019 Sundance award winner Clemency, was one of the more exciting auteur breakouts of the last few years. Yet, thanks to a lacklustre awards campaign and a release schedule scuppered by COVID, it didn’t make the impact it deserved to. Her follow-up, Till, should have no such problems. Telling the horrifying yet stirring story of Mamie Till-Mobley (Danielle Deadwyler) and her fight for justice after the disgusting racist murder of her 14-year-old son Emmett Till (Jalyn Hall), it’s the kind of biopic that demands your – and the Academy’s – attention, centred on a truly powerhouse lead performance.

Emmett was murdered in the summer of 1955 whilst visiting his cousins in the segregated Deep South state of Mississippi, lynched by a pair of white men – Roy Bryant and JW Milam – after Bryant’s wife Carolyn (Haley Bennett) falsely accused Emmett of harassing her in her store. Chukwu builds the story around this incident, but lets us get to know Emmett for a while before the murder. Hall is great in the role, a real ray of sunshine, and though the inevitable tragedy haunts his every scene, the jolliness that Emmett brings to a room is crucial to Chukwu’s aims of letting us see him as he was seen by himself and his loved ones; not a casualty of history, but simply a kid.

Chukwu doesn’t show the murder itself, but we do hear it and, most importantly, see Emmett’s corpse in the aftermath. It’s a profoundly distressing moment, his young body battered by violence and bloated by river water after Bryant and Milam dumped it, but looking at the vile sight is the whole point. In a moment of extraordinary strength, courage, and foresight, Mamie demanded an open-casket funeral for her son back their home city of Chicago, forcing the eyes of America and the world to see the evil wrought by white supremacy.

Of course, this story is already written, and Mamie would find no real justice in Mississippi – the fact that the murder even went to trial was remarkable for the time and place – but the horrors she experienced and publicised became a rallying point for the Civil Rights Movement, a cry for restitution that made a colossal stride forward. As a woman wracked by the most unimaginable grief but still finding a way to be a part of the world, Deadwyler is fantastic, giving one of the year’s most powerful lead performances and properly elevating the film around her.

Mamie’s mourning is unvarnished, a ragged, even startling thing that threatens to tear the screen in half in its rawest moments, but Deadwyler is just as good when she has to hold it all together. A sequence in which Mamie delivers her testimony at the murder trial before being badgered by a heinous and deeply bigoted cross-examination, all in a single unbroken take, is Till’s showstopper moment, an absolutely gripping piece of performance that you simply can’t take your eyes off of. Chukwu drew a career-best performance from Alfre Woodard for Clemency, and Till further cements her as a real actor’s director.

The energy can flag between Deadwyler’s key scenes, and a very “Oscar Season Movie” score does feel mostly over-insistent (there are more than a few moments that cry out for a silence that the soundtrack simply doesn’t allow for), but as an actors’ showcase and tribute to an incredible Black mother, Till is a very moving triumph. This history is not old – the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Bill was only passed into law this year and Carolyn Bryant is still alive and kicking in Kentucky, having never faced a single consequence for her foulness – but Till pokes at this still very much open wound with care and consideration. In celebrating Mamie and Emmett as much as it possibly can alongside the grinding misery of their story, it avoids feeling cynical or exploitative as it tackles one of the most heart-wrenching crimes of 20th century America.

Till is released in UK cinemas on 6 January.