“Your brother is with the ancestors,” says Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett) to her daughter Shuri (Letitia Wright), her voice slow and thick with grief, in the opening minutes of Ryan Coogler’s “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.”
There was no other way this movie could start: Chadwick Boseman, heart and soul of the 2018 megahit “Black Panther,” tragically died of cancer in 2020 at the age of 43, and Coogler and his team needed to not only mourn the loss of a colleague and friend, but to completely reshape a franchise. Instead of being its center, Boseman’s T’Challa is a spirit that lovingly haunts the film; his presence is constant, sometimes literally in softly glowing film clips from the original, sometimes figuratively, in the sadness visibly carried by the characters left behind.
It’s part of the great strength of “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” that it doesn’t shy away from that sadness; this is, after all, a superhero movie, and Coogler might have been forgiven for wanting to quickly cut to the chase, so to speak. Instead, the film takes time to show us a mother’s hand slowly stroking a coffin; to demonstrate that sometimes, even long after a loss, it’s hard to move on. There’s a lovely, quiet scene between Ramonda and Shuri, after the film has jumped forward to a year after T’Challa’s death, in which mother and daughter talk about how they cope, or don’t. “I found your brother in the breeze,” Ramonda says, describing how she finds comfort in feeling T’Challa’s guiding hand on her shoulder. That’s not him, Shuri says flatly; this young woman of science is still struggling to understand death’s finality.
