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What Daniel Kaluuya’s Film Endings Really Tell Us
Ending a central Black character’s life isn’t something Hollywood knows how to handle
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Over the course of four years, actor Daniel Kaluuya has amassed a catalog of film work that has loomed large in pop culture discourse, especially among Black folks. Those movies are 2017’s Get Out, 2019’s Queen & Slim, and this month’s Judas and the Black Messiah. You could add 2018’s Black Panther and Widows to this list based on film quality and Kaluuya’s performance, but I want to focus on the other three because they all have one thing in common: They all featured Daniel Kaluuya playing characters who meet traumatic ends.
In Queen & Slim, Kaluuya’s Slim is brutally gunned down by a police firing squad with his partner, a Black woman, by his side. In Get Out, the original script detailed Chris being swallowed by the system just as he was about to triumph over the racist Armitage family. And Judas and the Black Messiah, of course, is constructed around Fred Hampton’s assassination. Each murder is handled differently. Each takes its own approach to presenting Black death. Together, though, they suggest a connected conversation about what it means to put…
