sick feeling of dread propels Chinonye Chukwu’s powerful movie: dread at the racist violence about to happen, dread at the racist violence that is then threatened against those standing up against it. This film is about Emmett Till, the black 14-year-old tortured and lynched in 1955 Mississippi for supposedly whistling at a white woman, whose testimony at the subsequent murder trial was disputed.
Danielle Deadwyler plays Mamie Till, a calm, determined professional woman and single parent; Whoopi Goldberg has a cameo as her mother, Alma. Jalyn Hall plays Emmett as a smart, extrovert kid with an irrepressible puppyish enthusiasm: cheeky, but no more cheeky than many other teenagers, and mostly just naive. He is sent from his home town of Chicago to stay with family in Mississippi for the summer, with a stern warning from his mother to be careful around white people.
Some of the film’s purest nausea resides in the trial itself, with the swaggeringly open racism of the court officials and police. Quite clearly, the fact that any trial was possible at all was down to Mamie Till and the NAACP who took up her cause; it was virtually a private prosecution, the terrible burden for this being placed entirely on Mamie Till herself.
Till is a fierce portrait of courage and a sombre study of the human cost involved in resisting this kind of barbarity.