If I Go Will They Miss Me review

If I Go Will They Miss Me is one of those movies where I can recognize that something is very well done without necessarily enjoying the experience of watching it as much as I would have liked. Walter Thompson-Hernández wrote and directed this, expanding his Sundance-winning short of the same name into a full feature. This follows a Black family in Watts as the father, Big Ant, played by J. Alphonse Nicholson, comes home after being incarcerated and tries to reconnect with a family that has been living without him.

Danielle Brooks plays his wife, Lozita, and they have three children. Their oldest daughter, Acacia, is smart and doing well in school, there’s a baby, and then there’s 12-year-old Lil Ant, played by Bodhi Dell, who is really the center of the movie. He’s artistic, imaginative and at that awkward age where he’s beginning to figure out who he is. He has spent so much time without his father that he has basically turned the man into a mythological figure in his head. His father comes home and discovers that the actual relationship is considerably more complicated.

Big Ant doesn’t really know how to connect with his son. He comes out of a culture where there are pretty rigid ideas about what a boy is supposed to be, and Lil Ant doesn’t necessarily fit what his father expects. His father is also trying to keep him away from the same things that sent him down the wrong path in the first place, but he’s not particularly good at figuring out how to do that. He’s trying to protect the kid from becoming him while also being frustrated that the kid isn’t more like him. That’s an interesting contradiction.

There’s a lot of visual metaphor around all of this. Lil Ant sees his father through Greek mythology. There are airplanes constantly overhead, visions of children flying, horses, and all of this imagery about escape, freedom and people disappearing. Big Ant works around the Compton Cowboys, which gives the horse imagery an actual place in his everyday life rather than making it purely symbolic. The movie is also rooted very specifically in Watts and the communities around LAX. It’s not using a generic “inner city” as a backdrop. This is a particular place and the filmmaker clearly knows it.

And I got all of that. I understood what the movie was doing. This gives me some Moonlight vibes in the way it looks at Black masculinity, boyhood and a father struggling with a son who doesn’t fit comfortably inside his expectations. Big Ant is also a drug dealer, he’s fucking around on his wife, and he’s carrying around all of his own problems while supposedly trying to keep his son from repeating them. This is very basic real-life stuff in microcosm, presented through a much more poetic visual style.

I just didn’t enjoy watching it very much.

That’s different from saying I thought it was bad. I didn’t. It’s very well made, and I think there are two groups of people who may get considerably more out of this than I did. If you have no real relationship with communities like this, the movie gives you a pretty intimate look inside one without treating the people who live there like sociological exhibits. On the other hand, if you did grow up in a family or community that looks something like this, I imagine there’s a lot here that may make you feel seen.

I’m sort of stuck between those groups. This isn’t really the community I grew up in, but I’m also not disconnected enough from it that watching everyday Black family life is some kind of revelation for me. So I mostly found myself appreciating what Thompson-Hernández was doing rather than actually being pulled into it.

This feels like exactly the kind of lyrical, slice-of-life film that’s going to do very well at festivals and with critics, and I understand why. It’s thoughtful, beautifully made and clearly personal. I just don’t think it’s for me. I wouldn’t broadly recommend it unless this kind of film is already your thing, but I can absolutely recognize that it’s well done