116 min | R | March 31, 2023 | Focus Features
Inez kidnaps her own son from foster care and builds a life with him in a Harlem that is being sold out from under them both. A.V. Rockwell turns a decade of gentrification into a family secret waiting to detonate. Teyana Taylor announces herself as a movie star.
Inez is a hairdresser fresh out of Rikers who takes her six-year-old son Terry out of the foster system and onto a bus. She does not have a plan. She has a fierce refusal to let the city raise her child the way it tried to raise her. The film tracks them across roughly a decade of New York, from the early Giuliani years through Bloomberg, as the Harlem around them gets scrubbed clean of the people who built it. A.V. Rockwell makes the city itself the antagonist. Inez fights to hold a family together inside a system designed to dissolve it.
Teyana Taylor plays Inez with a coiled physicality that never asks to be liked. She is volatile and tender in the same breath, capable of slapping a caseworker down with one sentence and then folding her son into her chest. Will Catlett plays Lucky as a man who keeps trying to be the father he never had and keeps falling short of it. The three actors who play Terry build a single continuous person across the years, with Josiah Cross carrying the oldest version as a quiet teenager doing the math on his own origins. Aaron Kingsley Adetola gives the youngest Terry a wariness that explains everything that comes later.
Rockwell writes and directs her first feature with the patience of someone who refuses to rush a decade. Eric Yue shoots the film on grainy stock that shifts its aspect ratio as the years pass, so the frame literally widens as Terry grows into the world. The score by Gary Gunn leans on strings that swell without telling you how to feel. Rockwell layers in archival audio of mayors promising a cleaner safer city, and the promises curdle against the apartment Inez is about to lose. The gentrification is not background. It is the slow violence the script keeps in the corner of the frame.
This is a film about the price of holding on to someone the state has already filed away. Inez commits an act of love that is also a crime, and Rockwell never pretends the two can be separated. A late revelation reframes everything that came before without cheapening it. The film earns its ending by refusing to make Inez a saint or a cautionary tale. It lets her be a mother who did the one thing she could and lived inside the consequences.