Why ‘Till’ may be too real for Gen Z

“Till,” directed by Chinonye Chukwu, is a film with two primary goals: shining a fresh light on the brutal murder of Emmett Till and erecting a platform of visibility for the incredible acts of strength and courage that his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, took in the aftermath.

The movie features standout performances from Danielle Deadwyler (“The Harder They Fall”), Jalyn Hall (“All American”, “All Day And a Night”), and Whoopi Goldberg (“The Color Purple”, “Sister Act”).

Ahead of the movie’s nationwide release on October 28, the film is already being met with criticism.

In an interview with USA Today, Deadwyler met these criticisms head-on. “Do you want to turn a blind eye to history in the way that certain people and systems and institutions want to turn a blind eye to our imprint on this country?”

“In the same way that people did not want to look at Emmett, you’re saying it again by saying you don’t want to see [the film],” she continues. “With love, I ask you to be a witness.”

This weekend, I went to an early showing of “Till” with my grandmother. It was important for me to see a narrative that allowed an impactful Black female activist to take center stage in a genre that favors Black male-led stories. Having grown up with Till as a core marker of my Black history education, I’d felt appropriately prepared for what I was about to witness and, to Deadwyler’s point, obligated to “be a witness.”

The film starts with unassumingly bright imagery. Mamie (Deadwyler) and her son Emmett (Hall) sing to each other in the car as they complete a shopping trip ahead of Emmett’s trip to Money, Mississippi in 1955. The sun shines down on the smiling duo, but there’s an evident undercurrent of fear. The snare bangs a little too loud in the background. Emmett’s smile is too bright. Mamie’s eyes are too wide. Someone who didn’t know what lay ahead could enjoy the scene for what it was: a nice outing on the town between mother and son. I knew better.

The movie maintains this atmosphere until it reaches its unnatural apex in the convenience store, where the fateful encounter between Emmett and Carolyn Bryant unfolds—the same encounter that would lead to his death. The anxiety in the room is palpable when Emmett speaks his first flirty line to Carolyn, but the biggest crowd reaction follows the infamous wolf whistle that seals his fate.

I feel my body cage in on itself. My grandmother, sitting to my right, sighs. A Black elder to the left shakes her head. We all knew what was coming.

Viewers are spared visuals of the lynching that follows, but the damage had already been done. I’d sat in my shock and tears, only comforted in that Mamie and moviegoers alike cried with me upon seeing what had been left of the once kind and ebullient fourteen-year-old boy.

The movie itself is everything a Black history film should be: no gratuitous racial violence, no fictionalized benevolent white savior, and no dishonest happy ending to gratify the audience into dismissing the atrocities they’ve witnessed. Deadwyler’s portrayal is excellent: I smiled when Mamie smiled, I sobbed when Mamie sobbed, I raged when Mamie raged. Yet, I left the theater feeling as though I’d been psychologically tortured for the full duration of the two-hour runtime.

My grandmother, who shared a similar distance from racialized violence as Mamie growing up, raved about the impact of Till-Mobley’s work and couldn’t understand why I didn’t enjoy the movie. “Emmett Till put a name to this injustice that countless nameless Black males had experienced for decades before him,” she texted in our discussion long after we’d gotten home. “Like George Floyd, he made the nation acknowledge [the] evilness of racism.”

That much had been clear, through both her words and her actions. When the distraught mother removes the sheet from her son’s corpse and allows a photographer to document the damage that Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam had inflicted, Mamie firmly demonstrates to the world “what white supremacy has done to my child.”

Her decision was audacious and impactful set against the landscape of the United States in 1955, where even Mamie concedes that she’d been content to live her life in Chicago thinking that racial terrorism was a Southern problem that didn’t and never would truly concern her. However, the numerous images of young Emmett Till’s disfigured body blend into a horrific sequence of mangled Black bodies circulating the ever-growing feed of news and media in today’s increasingly overexposed society.

These sentiments aren’t just felt among Twitter users; Yahoo and Time Magazine recently shared articles reflecting a community-wide exasperation with the continued push for Black pain and suffering in popular media. Ultimately, we as a generation are far too familiar with seeing society let the harm and suffering of Black people go unpunished in real life—we don’t need it redone in 4K.

Despite the ongoing discourse, “Till” has been in talks to receive Oscar nods and, given the Academy’s proclivity for recognizing Black history films depicting trauma, it is a strong contender. The story of Mamie Till-Mobley is one worth being a witness to—if you can take it.