Till film review — meticulous account of a 1950s racist murder

Some movies are handsome as a simple selling point: period pieces most of all. Far rarer is one like Till, where every pleasing costume has an awful double edge. Chinonye Chukwu’s unshakeable film is filled with the bright veneers of the American 1950s. There are pristine department stores, sharp tailoring, the happy jazz of Dizzy Gillespie. But the subject is an abyss of tragedy: the 1955 death of Emmett Till, the black Chicago 14-year-old tortured and killed in a racist murder while visiting family in Mississippi.

Photographs of his brutalised body sped the march to civil rights. Yet there were earlier pictures of him too, snapshots of a beaming boy Chukwu is determined we will know as well. You see him the minute young actor Jalyn Hall appears, a happy, dapper city kid. The gaze of his mother Mamie (Danielle Deadwyler) is easy to read: one of love, pride and gut unease at his pending trip to the South.

That look underpins all that follows. So too the Tills’ middle-class life in Chicago, where Mamie works in a typing pool and Emmett sings along to advertising jingles. Here, American capitalism has allowed a certain progress, however deeply caveated. (Those gleaming department stores are not really so broad-minded.) But as Mamie tells her son, he is going to another America.

The timing of Till is predictable. Sixty-five years after the history it recreates, the greenlight came in August 2020. George Floyd died that May. How many execs passed before then? The arc, after all, is far from the studio comfort zone of reassuring redemptions. (No one was ever convicted of the killing.) Now, the dark allure of film haunts the story. In Chicago, those lovely surfaces recall Hollywood great Douglas Sirk, whose 1950s melodramas peeled back layers to reveal painful social truths. In Mississippi, a dazzled Emmett gives an adult white woman the era’s highest compliment. He says she looks like a movie star.

Then he whistles. The woman, Carolyn Bryant (Haley Bennett), later told a court he sexually threatened her. By that point he would already be dead.

The murder is not shown. Chukwu is meticulous about what she puts on screen. We do see Emmett abducted in the night, a boy seized by men, like a future stolen by a monstrous past. Afterwards the focus becomes his mother. Even broken by loss, she makes a critical decision. Her son will have an open-casket funeral, to show where racism leads us. And the world will see the photographs.

Deadwyler gives a masterclass of measured emotion. Witness her tiny, Herculean flickers of restraint at the trial of the men charged with murdering her son. Audiences reared on movie courtroom scenes might expect legal justice. Mamie Till does not.

And Chukwu shows the studios how to tell this story without diminishing an inch of gravity. Her film is a study of parental devotion, and the need to identify guilt even when a system is unfit to do the same. Ahead of an awards season filled with giddy movies celebrating movies themselves, Till honours something more important: the power of a picture that speaks the truth.

★★★★☆

In UK cinemas from January 6