Sundance ‘26: Fury and Fathers Fly Over ‘IF I GO WILL THEY MISS ME’

There’s something in the air in If I Go Will They Miss Me. Planes drone overhead constantly in this lyrical, Moonlight-coded debut, a feature-length expansion of Walter Thompson-Hernández’s earlier short of the same name. Beneath them, a father and son circle each other in a jagged dance of longing, legacy, and quiet double-edged disappointment. Big Ant (J. Alphonse Nicholson) is a man defined by absence; absent during long stretches of incarceration, and absent emotionally even when he’s physically present. His son, Little Ant (Bodhi Dell), watches him like a mythic figure, both larger-than-life and heartbreakingly small. There’s tension in their bond, Big Ant knows he’s not the man his son should emulate, but he’s too damaged, too volatile to pivot. Or even try to explain himself.

The film unfolds under the flight path of LAX, and the airplanes above aren’t just background noise, they’re constant, looming symbols. Flight here becomes a metaphor with split ends. Is it about escape, ascension, or abandonment? Little Ant’s fascination with Pegasuses—winged horses born of mythology and his father’s day job at a local stable—suggests he sees flight as destiny, something he can control. For Big Ant, those same flights might be grim reminders of friends lost to the streets, of dreams deferred indefinitely.

Father and son begin to see specters, ghosts in plain white tees, hovering on the periphery. Whether hallucinations or hauntings, they press on the edges of reality like trauma made manifest. The film doesn’t explain them. It just lets them linger, like memories. Or regret.

Nicholson’s performance is a thunderstorm, roaring one minute, eerily still the next. Big Ant is not a man easy to root for; he cheats, he lies, he lashes out. He hits his son. He misses important family events and second and third and fourth chances. And yet, Nicholson finds cracks in the armor, moments where you still manage to feel for him. It’s a performance you remember more in tone than in detail; volcanic, then suddenly eerily quiet.

Danielle Brooks plays his wife with a kind of exhausted grace. She’s been holding things together while he was inside, and now she’s trying to do it again, despite knowing better. Brooks brings maternal warmth laced with bruised realism, her eruptions feel earned. She is, simply, very good.

Meanwhile, Little Ant begins to follow in his father’s footsteps, and not in the way his mother hopes. Fights at school. Petty theft. A growing anger with nowhere to go. The film doesn’t present this as destiny, but it does show the gravitational pull of broken cycles, and how hard it is to resist them when the blueprint is all you’ve ever known. But Big Ant knows that his progeny’s antisocial behaviors are not the same brand as his. They are performative. Possibly only for him.

Thompson-Hernández emerges here as a filmmaker of promise and precision. His direction is ghostly and graceful, capturing the highs and lows of both a struggling but lively community life with a documentarian’s eye and a poet’s sense of rhythm. The blues are bruised. The skies gape. The faces, so many faces, stare directly into the lens, and the lens stares back, daring us to look away. Yes, some elements feel over-reached or undercooked, elements that lean too hard into the overly mythic, scenes that could’ve used a trim. But it’s hard to hold that against a debut this heartfelt, this haunted. If I Go Will They Miss Me is a meditation on legacy, love, and the weight of wings. Sometimes, the most loving thing you can do is leave, so the ones you care about can finally learn how to fly.

CONCLUSION: ‘If I Go Will They Miss Me’, the debut from writer-director Walter Thompson-Hernández’, is an impactful portrait of a frayed relationship between a distant father and his impressionable son in the projects. In its best moments, the work is reminiscent of Barry Jenkins, marking Thompson-Hernández as someone to keep a close eye on.