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Formally ambitious and narratively elliptical, “If I Go Will They Miss Me” uses a strained father-son relationship as a lens to survey, and elevate, Black Angelino life. Expanding upon his 2022 Sundance Short Film Jury Award-winning short by the same name, writer-director Walter Thompson-Hernández adopts a painter’s eye towards the local Watts community. He affords faces with warm close-ups and captures individuals and groups alike in static celebratory portraits. He treats the Nickerson Gardens housing projects, the film’s primary setting, like a safe haven, a place where expressions of love and conflict, murmurs of gossip and bullshit, are allowed to roam free. Thompson-Hernández acknowledges that while Watts might be a small community, a relative sliver of greater Los Angeles, imagination flourishes in the most circumscribed places.
Case in point: drawing and crafts are creative outlets for Lil Ant (Bodhi Dell), a sensitive twelve-year old whose interest in Greek mythology intersect with the return of his father, Big Ant (J. Alphonse Nicholson), from a stint in prison. Upon his homecoming, Lil Ant compares his father to Odysseus arriving home after years at war; later, he likens him to Poseidon, and subsequently himself to the God’s trusty winged horse Pegasus. Unnerved by his son’s reverence, Big Ant keeps his distance from the boy and subtly pressures him to toughen up and abandon his artistic pursuits.
While trauma and toxic masculinity linger like specters in the background of “If I Go,” Thompson-Hernández permits them to merely contextualize rather than overwhelm the drama. Case in point: Big Ant’s concern about his son’s interest in art doesn’t stem from his discomfort with its feminine implications, or that it might make him a potential target away from home. Instead, it connects with his fear that the two are more alike than he initially believed. Big Ant was also a creative adolescent until a peer-pressured assault forced him into the criminal justice system; he sees his son’s passion as a harbinger of doom that will force him down a similarly harsh path. His fears intensify when he discovers that they both see the same hallucinatory vision of the neighborhood kids acting like planes, complete 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 at the airport dominated his soundscape. Subsequently, the filmmaker became enamored with airplanes and transferred that same fascination onto Lil Ant, who eyes the planes overhead with palpable yearning and, at one point, shoplifts a toy plane from a store. The dreamlike image of kids-as-planes stresses the various “flights” that permeate “If I Go”: the emotional journey of adolescence, the physical departures of adults, and people’s imagined escapes for themselves far into the future.
Informed and influenced by the works of Black filmmakers like Charles Burnett, Kahlil Joseph, Barry Jenkins, and Spike Lee, as well as visual artists like Jacob Lawrence and Kerry James Marshall, Thompson-Hernández brings considerable rigor to his sophomore feature. His frame exhibits a restrained beauty that honors and uplifts, rather than condescends to, its environment; in other words, he respects his audience. Thompson-Hernández’s background as a feature writer for the New York Times has also supplied him with a keen ear for the spoken phrase, expressed in the film’s rich and believable dialogue, as well as a facility with performers of all backgrounds. Everyone from seasoned actors like Nicholson and Danielle Brooks, who plays matriarch Lozita, to the various non-professionals that populate the frame evince a palpable comfort with being on screen, which allows them to fully inhabit their respective characters. A strong foundation of stylized realism affords “If I Go” to integrate the fantastic without rendering it incoherent, illustrating a quiet confidence on behalf of its cast and crew.
Yet, the clunky meanings behind such potently surreal imagery points to the noble faults in “If I Go.” The overly obvious aviation motif, for example, might have had more room to breathe if it wasn’t competing with the Grecian myths that Lil Ant uses to explain his family’s dynamic. As much as Thompson-Hernández strives to dovetail the two metaphors into a cohesive thematic framework, they feel stubbornly separated from each other, especially as “If I Go” develops.
While “If I Go” deserves praise for eschewing traditional three-act structure and using lyrical vignettes as a lodestar instead of an engineered plot, its central parental relationship remains frustratingly schematic, even at its most heartfelt. There are no real surprises that occur between Big and Lil Ant, our viewpoint into the film’s world, or even between Big Ant and Lozita, whose relationship feels real but too familiar. Characters keep secrets from each other, but there are no secrets from the audience. You always know why Big Ant acts distant or aggressive towards his son, and oftentimes when it will occur, as well as the ways it will (fail to) resolve. Highpoints, such as when Big Ant quietly admires the craftsmanship of his son’s Pegasus wings before rejecting them for confused reasons, unproductively blend together with facile ones, like a signposted scene of physical abuse.
“If I Go” exhibits frequently strong formal and writerly instincts that the lapses — Dell and Nicholson’s affected voiceover, the choice to chintzily animate Lil Ant’s sketches, the bouts of flowery writing—feel especially disruptive. Thompson-Hernández’s discreet abstention from stereotypical depictions of poverty and gang life would be notable on its own, but that he de facto replaces them with visions of urban stableman who view horses like healers is a powerful substitution. Moreover, his decision to embrace the incompleteness of life as “If I Go” reaches its conclusion instead of using tragedy to artificially juice the drama suggests a refreshingly mature artistic worldview, something that the Sundance Film Festival, not to mention the film industry as a whole, could stand to support.
Grade: B
“If I Go Will They Miss Me” premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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