Written by: A.V. Rockwell
Starring: Teyana Taylor, Will Catlett, Josiah Cross, Aven Courtney, Aaron Kingsley Adetola
Rating: [4/5]
The love a mother has for her child reaches levels beyond human comprehension, as we have seen time and time again with valiant stories through all sorts of media. These stories never get old because they represent the purest forms of love, which A Thousand and One uses to propel itself in its potent and effective tale. Operating not only through its story of a mother and son, but also the political issues impacting their lives in New York.
Freshly out of Rikers prison, Inez (Teyana Taylor) finds her son, Terry (Aaron Kingsley), who’s in foster care but mostly hangs out on the street. After an injury that sees him hospitalized, she takes the opportunity to abduct him and care for him even to the point of forging a new birth certificate and social security number hoping to start over and turning over a new leaf.
Following a story that centers on child abduction where we actually are asked to root for this mother puts the audience in a peculiar place. Yes, it’s sweet that Inez desperately wants to do right by her son by receiving another chance, but by not going through the proper channels where Terry is a ward of the state and she simply takes him certainly conflicts a bit. Going to this level of extreme in order to get her son back equally has this endearing quality, but also very much an illegal action by Inez that displays this film’s insistence on living in the consequences of the decisions made by the characters involved.
Having Terry back in her life gives Inez the spark to get her life in order, which includes getting a job that will support her in addition to getting back with her man Lucky (Will Catlett) as they try to make this as functional of a family unit as possible for the sake of the young boy. Plenty of dysfunction has occurred between them already and Inez wants to make up for lost time and give the young boy a better life than she had. This infectious love she has for him never escapes the grasp of this film for even a second, which speaks to its ultimate strength in the way it magnifies the importance of what Inez does as a mother. She shows she will do absolutely anything for this boy but also being a firm mother.
Underscoring everything happening with this nuclear family, we have the general change happening in New York at the end of the 20th and the start of the 21st century and how that ultimately impacts everyone in the community and Inez’s family unit as well. From the advent of stop-and-frisk to the predatory workarounds by landlords to break rent-controlled apartment leases, it all has a significant impact on Inez, Lucky, and Terry in ways that typically do not receive the highlight they deserve as there were victims to these policies and we viscerally see how they play out in this film.
Anchoring this film to the very core is a tremendous performance by Teyana Taylor as she carries the love and scorn of a mother trying to piece everything together for her son. She carries this resoluteness to her in the way she approaches everything involving her family that never gets lost from the first to the last minute throughout this feature. You can feel the pain in her eyes in moments where she feels she has failed in addition to the anger of her particular circumstances. It brings this incredible combination into this powerhouse of a performance that comes with this guarded persona that makes those little moments where she can display some vulnerability all the more powerful. Truly marvelous stuff on her end, but she gets helped on by an incredible story pieced together by A.V. Rockwell.
As straightforward as my description of this film may appear for this film it works in service of trying to respectfully conceal the wonderful reveal A.V. Rockwell weaves into this story. A reveal that serves as a complete recontextualization of this story that not only sweeps the audience off of its feet but makes the incredible love Inez has for Terry and Lucky all the more potent. It only further demonstrates the love a mother could have for her child in ways that I did not think a film would ever try to pull off and on her feature film directorial debut, Rockwell absolutely knocks it out of the park. I dare not say more but her talent immensely impresses here and I feverishly look forward to what she decides to grace us all next with.
Quite the viewing experience, A Thousand and One works with layers that bring an incredible amount of catharsis with the narrative. There are elements that appear like a smoking gun that will eventually be fired and it builds this tension in the background and lulls us before bringing it right back right when the narrative calls for it. It serves as a testament to the great work by A.V. Rockwell in addition to her lead actor, Teyana Taylor, who help shepherd this film to a blazing success and complete surprise to me in how it examines motherhood and the love one could have for a child.
Films with Josh 
