Don’t Make Me Go review: A heartfelt road-trip movie held together by a brilliant John Cho

“I did not know we did not have enough time,” Wally, played by Mia Isaac says to her father after he reveals he has a tumour that will possibly kill him within the space of a year. Amazon Prime Video’s Don’t Make Me Go is about the impermanence of life, but also really about taking your chances when they come at you. Chance here is of course the subject of entropy, of decay and of time’s inevitability. In this sweet little road-trip film, it’s also about these chances being chances only if they are taken. Or else the trip exists for the sake of drifting. There is no destination you are going to arrive at, the film says, if you don’t clutch at belief however, uncertain. Don’t Make Me Go is a heartfelt, warm little film about a father and a daughter that though built on familiar tropes, brings something new to an old story.

The film stars John Cho as Mark, an anal single parent raising a typically rebellious teenager in Wally. Cho has evolved from his days as one half of Harold and Kumar and his recent roles as father figure – including the terrific Searching – have substantiated a precocious talent that is waiting to be tapped by some of the best directors around. Mark is a 9 to 5 guy who according to his daughter ‘got a job where he could wear loafers’. It’s a snide, but affirmative insight into Mark’s world, that has made all the space for the monotony of relief rather than the prickly sensations of enthusiasm. The only real obsession Mark has is his daughter after the two were abandoned by his wife. After Mark discovers he has a fatal tumour he decides to take a road trip to visit his alumni friends, and among them, his estranged ex-wife.

Don’t Make Me Go runs along familiar channels, doffing its hat at the many road-trip clichés and symbolisms. But there is some pleasing cultural friction at play here, in the way Mark’s over-possessiveness comes in the way of Wally’s sense of exploration. In one sequence, Wally elopes with a friend she meets in New Mexico, and while Mark is visibly displeased with her actions, he chooses to not act on it in person. Not in the full sight of people around him. He has that kind of respect for her, and picks odd, unremarkable ways to express it. The fact that the daughter wishes to learn driving on the trip, serves as a potent metaphor for letting the girl finally take the control of her own journey. Turns out, it isn’t just a trip for Wally, but one that becomes Mark’s reckoning in different ways.

The good thing about Don’t Make Me Go is the fact that it stays true to the poignancy of the father’s conundrum. Even though Wally starts the narration by saying “You’re not going to like how this story ends, but you will like this story” , the film is told from the father’s perspective. His reluctance to expose his daughter to everything at once, and yet prepare her for a life possibly without him, make for a strained, inner world that Cho’s magisterial acting captures perfectly. He rarely smiles, or emotes beyond the perfunctory reaction and it hints at a man painfully at odds with his instincts. He wishes to let everything out but by doing so risks being looked at as an object of sympathetic reflection. This was after all, once, a possible rockstar in the making; a man who sang, was part of a band and as is revealed later, had a darker side to him too. All men are complex. They just become pale and ponderous as life’s trivialities take over. Faced with an event of epic proportions then, they visibly look hassled, spooked, unsure of how to deal with the uncertain.

Don’t Make Me Go is as much about Mark’s growth as it is about Wally’s maturity. The teenager pulls her weight as the hardened-beyond-her-years girl whose father won’t let her off the hook. There is a beauty to her restrained youth, the way it bubbles through in chirpy, scathing criticism of her dad’s many choices and in the ones she has been forced into. The two actors complement each other well, and even though the story can begin to resemble other road-trip films of the past both Isaac and Cho stamp this one with their own imprint. About the ending, which is treated as a bittersweet shock of sorts, I’m still divided. You won’t see it coming, but it kind of makes the larger point across of taking your shots while you have them. Living life while it is letting you choose, because you never really know when those feet under the rug being pulled, turn out to be yours.

Watch trailer here:

The author writes on art and culture, cinema, books, and everything in between. Views expressed are personal.

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