Formally formidable and narratively elliptical, “If I Go Will They Miss Me” makes use of a strained father-son relationship as a lens to survey, and elevate, Black Angelino life. Increasing upon his 2022 Sundance Brief Movie Jury Award-winning brief by the identical identify, writer-director Walter Thompson-Hernández adopts a painter’s eye in the direction of the native Watts neighborhood. He affords faces with heat close-ups and captures people and teams alike in static celebratory portraits. He treats the Nickerson Gardens housing initiatives, the movie’s major setting, like a protected haven, a spot the place expressions of affection and battle, murmurs of gossip and bullshit, are allowed to roam free. Thompson-Hernández acknowledges that whereas Watts may be a small neighborhood, a relative sliver of better Los Angeles, creativeness thrives in essentially the most circumscribed locations.
Living proof: drawing and crafts are artistic retailers for Lil Ant (Bodhi Dell), a delicate twelve-year previous whose curiosity in Greek mythology intersect with the return of his father, Huge Ant (J. Alphonse Nicholson), from a stint in jail. Upon his homecoming, Lil Ant compares his father to Odysseus arriving dwelling after years at battle; later, he likens him to Poseidon, and subsequently himself to the God’s trusty winged horse Pegasus. Unnerved by his son’s reverence, Huge Ant retains his distance from the boy and subtly pressures him to toughen up and abandon his creative pursuits.
Whereas trauma and poisonous masculinity linger like specters within the background of “If I Go,” Thompson-Hernández allows them to merely contextualize quite than overwhelm the drama. Living proof: Huge Ant’s concern about his son’s curiosity in artwork doesn’t stem from his discomfort with its female implications, or that it’d make him a possible goal away from dwelling. As a substitute, it connects together with his worry that the 2 are extra alike than he initially believed. Huge Ant was additionally a artistic adolescent till a peer-pressured assault pressured him into the legal justice system; he sees his son’s ardour as a harbinger of doom that may drive him down a equally harsh path. His fears intensify when he discovers that they each see the identical hallucinatory imaginative and prescient of the neighborhood youngsters appearing like planes, full with outstretched arms as wings, awaiting taking off on makeshift runways.
Born and raised in Huntington Park, Thompson-Hernández grew up beneath the LAX flight path and the roar of planes departing from and arriving on the airport dominated his soundscape. Subsequently, the filmmaker grew to become enamored with airplanes and transferred that very same fascination onto Lil Ant, who eyes the planes overhead with palpable craving and, at one level, shoplifts a toy aircraft from a retailer. The dreamlike picture of kids-as-planes stresses the varied “flights” that permeate “If I Go”: the emotional journey of adolescence, the bodily departures of adults, and folks’s imagined escapes for themselves far into the long run.
Knowledgeable and influenced by the works of Black filmmakers like Charles Burnett, Kahlil Joseph, Barry Jenkins, and Spike Lee, in addition to visible artists like Jacob Lawrence and Kerry James Marshall, Thompson-Hernández brings appreciable rigor to his sophomore function. His body displays a restrained magnificence that honors and uplifts, quite than condescends to, its setting; in different phrases, he respects his viewers. Thompson-Hernández’s background as a function author for the New York Occasions has additionally provided him with a eager ear for the spoken phrase, expressed within the movie’s wealthy and plausible dialogue, in addition to a facility with performers of all backgrounds. Everybody from seasoned actors like Nicholson and Danielle Brooks, who performs matriarch Lozita, to the varied non-professionals that populate the body evince a palpable consolation with being on display screen, which permits them to completely inhabit their respective characters. A robust basis of stylized realism affords “If I Go” to combine the incredible with out rendering it incoherent, illustrating a quiet confidence on behalf of its solid and crew.
But, the clunky meanings behind such potently surreal imagery factors to the noble faults in “If I Go.” The overly apparent aviation motif, for instance, may need had extra room to breathe if it wasn’t competing with the Grecian myths that Lil Ant makes use of to elucidate his household’s dynamic. As a lot as Thompson-Hernández strives to dovetail the 2 metaphors right into a cohesive thematic framework, they really feel stubbornly separated from one another, particularly as “If I Go” develops.
Whereas “If I Go” deserves reward for eschewing conventional three-act construction and utilizing lyrical vignettes as a lodestar as a substitute of an engineered plot, its central parental relationship stays frustratingly schematic, even at its most heartfelt. There are not any actual surprises that happen between Huge and Lil Ant, our viewpoint into the movie’s world, and even between Huge Ant and Lozita, whose relationship feels actual however too acquainted. Characters hold secrets and techniques from one another, however there are not any secrets and techniques from the viewers. You at all times know why Huge Ant acts distant or aggressive in the direction of his son, and oftentimes when it should happen, in addition to the methods it should (fail to) resolve. Highpoints, comparable to when Huge Ant quietly admires the craftsmanship of his son’s Pegasus wings earlier than rejecting them for confused causes, unproductively mix along with facile ones, like a signposted scene of bodily abuse.
“If I Go” displays incessantly sturdy formal and writerly instincts that the lapses — Dell and Nicholson’s affected voiceover, the selection to chintzily animate Lil Ant’s sketches, the bouts of flowery writing—really feel particularly disruptive. Thompson-Hernández’s discreet abstention from stereotypical depictions of poverty and gang life could be notable by itself, however that he the truth is replaces them with visions of city stableman who view horses like healers is a strong substitution. Furthermore, his determination to embrace the incompleteness of life as “If I Go” reaches its conclusion as a substitute of utilizing tragedy to artificially juice the drama suggests a refreshingly mature creative worldview, one thing that the Sundance Movie Pageant, to not point out the movie business as an entire, may stand to assist.
Grade: B
“If I Go Will They Miss Me” premiered on the 2026 Sundance Movie Pageant. It’s at the moment in search of U.S. distribution.
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