This Will Never Work: Black, Educated, and Socially Out of Place

A family comes together to address, middle child Amanda’s, drinking problem intervention-style with a therapist.

However, when she gets to the gathering, it’s revealed she doesn’t have a drinking problem and the family has lured her in to convince her to not move to Denver from Brooklyn.

photo via IMDb.com

This group consists of a mother, her three adult children, Julia, Amanda, and Bill, Uncle Ron, semi-adopted son Majd, Julia’s girlfriend Rachel, and the therapist, Trevor.

This Will Never Work tells the story of adult black children who grew up in spaces with people who didn’t look like them, how that shapes them as adults, a mother raising them all alone, and the family members who’ve been added along the way.

We feel the hurt of Linda, the mother, who’s been abandoned by all of her children’s fathers because they left or died, and how she’s pouring her experiences onto her children.

We feel the hurt of the children who want nothing more than to make their mother happy, but her uncompromising standards push them away from her too.

We feel the angst of the adult children who didn’t feel accepted by their peers or at home, and though each one of them mean well, their inability to express themselves keeps them in a cycle of hurt.

Directors Niccolo Aeed and Marina Tempelsman do a phenomenal job of setting the tone of the film immediately then weaving in storylines from the past to help the audience understand the story from multiple perspectives and timelines.

This Will Never Work is funny, heavy, relatable, intense and entertaining, having its world premiere at the Brooklyn Film Festival.