From the first scene, Till is haunted with grief. Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till (Jalyn Hall) sits in the front seat of a car with his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley (Danielle Deadwyler). The camera swirls up and around the smiling pair – director Chinonye Chukwu’s camera often orbits Mamie, the center of a universe of loss – as an upbeat 50s song blares from the radio. They laugh along, then the music sours and distorts as if in a horror movie, the sound warped by future sadness. It’s 1955, weeks before Emmett’s murder by two white men in Mississippi, and this memory will be one of the last.
Till is also freighted with a different haunting: the specter of Black pain molded into entertainment, of art made from the trauma of American anti-Blackness. The film, written by Chukwu, Michael Reilly and Keith Beauchamp, has been dogged from the start by a questionable premise. What does this reliving of Emmett Till’s brutal murder and Mamie’s subsequent activism accomplish? For whom are we conjuring the unimaginable pain of ghosts of past?
