[This story contains major spoilers from Don’t Make Me Go.]
In Do not let me goteenage head and young narrator Wally – played by budding star Mia Isaac – is just starting to struggle with the idea that her Dad may not be around forever when the unthinkable happens.
See the bittersweet road trip movie John Cho‘s Max takes his daughter to a class reunion, under the guise of friends. But unbeknownst to Wally, they really go in hopes that her father will see his ex and Wally’s mother, who has left them both. Max has been diagnosed with a terminal condition requiring surgery, which itself has a questionable chance of survival, and he hopes her mother can be the one to care for their child when he’s gone.
Max has kept his condition — and his plans to decline treatment and use his senior year to prepare her for life without him — a secret from his daughter. But when he reveals it to Wally after a heartbreaking conversation with her mother, the young teen’s initial reaction solidifies into a heated confrontation and a (minor) fender bender before the two are finally brought closer together than ever before.
But in the moment of their greatest clarity about each other, as Wally watches her father sing under the warm lights of a karaoke bar, their relationship takes a turn neither of them expected, ending in Wally’s death. Vera Herbert’s script and both Cho and Isaac’s performances contain the obvious honesty, dependence, and love between single parents and their children, which gives the film’s heartbreaking twist – that Wally, like her father, is also an (unknown and untreated) disease that makes them live unexpectedly — so hard to watch.
Isaac knew about her character’s death before she even secured the role in the film, with director Hannah Marks mistakenly assuming that the young actress had read the entire script during a Zoom audition. But, Isaac says, she didn’t know exactly where the teen’s death was in the story. “I had an idea of what the ending would be like,” says the actress. “But when I was reading that karaoke scene, I didn’t expect it to happen in That scene, and so for me I was instantly crying.”
Cho says reading that scene for the first time felt like a punch. “I didn’t know when I read the script, and then I had this kind of Keyser Söze moment where I followed, flipped back and tried to fit everything together,” he says.
Marks acknowledges that the moment is a “slow realization” with hints and “little seeds planted” throughout the film. That includes how the team visually represents Wally’s symptoms. “A lot of her illness manifests in a way that feels like normal teenage anxiety or panic, but they’re actually symptoms of something physically wrong with her,” Marks says.
The director says she and cameraman Jaron Presant had a special filter that he would “make with some glue on a piece of glass,” and that they would use it whenever Wally or Max got a headache or dizziness. “Those little visual indicators came to a head at the end of the karaoke, when lots of images of their faces were superimposed and the filters distorted reality,” she added.
Wally’s death is a delicate scene, which doubles as a moment of revelation and loss – ultimately giving way to hope for Max. In a film already bursting with emotion, that underlined the meaning of the film’s larger message and that literal and metaphorical mile-long journey that father and daughter had taken together.
Max spends the entire movie trying to protect Wally and doing what he can to make sure she’s okay when he dies. So he has this idea in his head that he can protect her from life,” Isaac says. “I think the big message of the story is that you can’t always protect your children from everything. Sometimes all you can do is just live with them and try to guide them through the things they experience and learn from them. “
Marks calls it a “very nice last moment between them”.
“Then Max finally listens to Wally and learns from her. She says: go up and take a risk, be confident and express yourself,” the director says THR. “This is when he finally does it and she comes to see him as a full-fledged human being with a past and a history and not just as her father. That way they really see each other and learn from each other.”
It’s a powerful scene that’s punctuated by much of what gives the rest of the film its charm: its fragility and humor. In the minutes before Wally dies, she sees her father erupting on a karaoke stage. Marks playfully says she took karaoke seriously, shrugging off Cho’s view that it doesn’t have to be good because it’s karaoke. “I was surprised that you thought maybe it wouldn’t be good because you’re gifted,” she says.
Isaac said she was impressed by Cho’s singing and “watched it every time.” For the actor, who described himself as a “willing karaokeer” and a solid singer, it was probably more painful for those watching him move through take after take. “We pre-recorded the song, but that day there was no music for the public and no drinks for the public,” Cho says with a laugh. “And I had to do it a lot, so it wasn’t as much fun as regular karaoke, but I never mind singing.”
That humor and joy leading up to the sobering reveal isn’t just about taking viewers by surprise before landing the film’s spin. Ultimately, the key is to understand how Wally and Max’s love has changed them both. “It’s a small but important, symbolic moment of willing submission to his daughter and her wishes, of throwing away his ego and his pride,” says Cho. “It’s a moment of risk bestowed on him by his daughter in the willingness to be vulnerable, and it’s one last lesson he must take.”
“I honestly think it’s so beautiful and beautiful that the last thing Wally sees is her father smiling at her,” added Marks. “That is really important to me. That their last moment together will be one of joy.”
Do not let me go streams on Amazon’s Prime Video.