The Unforgivable Review: A Film That Invites Us To Reflect On The Distortions Of The Judicial System

Director: Nora Fingscheidt

Cast: Sandra Bullock, Vincent D’Onofrio, Viola Davis

Streaming Platform: Netflix (click to watch)

Filmyhype Ratings: 3/5 (three star) [yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]

When you are confined to prison along with other criminals, the thought flies outside your cubicle to dream of the life that awaits you when you have paid your debt to justice. But the system is not perfect, not even remotely: outside the prison the resentment of the civilized world is palpable, no one has forgotten your crimes and will do whatever it takes to hold them against you every single day for the rest of your life. Outside of that concrete and metal prison that has kept them prisoners for years, the inmates find themselves in the immaterial cage built by unforgivable sins, imprisoned in a fake freedom that will never release them.

The Unforgivable: The Story

Ruth Slater (Sandra Bullock) is on probation, out of jail which held her prisoner for nearly twenty years on suspicion of killing a policeman. Having spent half of his life behind bars has forever disfigured his personality, reducing it to a shell of silence and solitude essential to go on without showing one’s suffering.

Ruth has no one waiting for her in the outside world: her parents are dead, while her little sister has been given up for adoption following the tragic crime that marked her existence. But the woman has no intention of forgetting the sister she raised as her daughter in the absence of her parents, and will do whatever it takes to meet her, challenging the system that vehemently protects the privacy of adopted children. As if her desperate search wasn’t complicated enough, Ruth will have to clash with a civil society that has stripped her of her identity., reducing his existence to the crime he committed: cop killer. History has not forgotten his crime, and the woman’s criminal act had great repercussions on the family of the man she killed: the agent’s children, who grew up dysfunctional due to mourning, relive the injustice they suffered during the childhood seeing the woman who destroyed their lives granted probation. Two existences saturated with guilt and suffering badly buried, destined to intersect causing new pains in a senseless spiral of revenge.

The Unforgivable– film adaptation of the 2009 English series of the same name – tells on Netflix the ordeal of a woman in a hostile world, in search of the only person she loves more than her own life. A realistic and painful film, which sheds light on the flaws of a prison system that is simply impracticable, but also a story of hope told through the stoicism of a former inmate ready to do anything to reunite with her sister. The film directed by Nora Fingscheidt – among the Netflix news of December 2021 – completely relies on the interpretations of its protagonists, who manage to impart the right power to a well-written but not very innovative film.

The Unforgivable intertwines two stories of love and hate, contrasting Ruth’s search with that of the policeman’s children whom she killed twenty years earlier. Both narratives proceed in parallel before the final confrontation, and they do so through a streamlined script that is devoted to the introspection of the characters rather than the search for the clamor of extraordinary events. The lives of the protagonists on the screen are rigid and predictable in their being realistic, but they differ from most existences because of the tragic trauma that has marked them: a trauma that they will be forced to relive, finding themselves unable to bury the past and unable to to move on.

The Unforgivable Review and Analysis

The subtext of the film is clear: in The Unforgivable the writer raise the thorny question of the validity of the prison system, showing the problem both from the point of view of the criminal and that of his victims. Ruth Slater committed a crime and paid for by throwing away her best years in prison, but – despite having served her prison sentence – society rejects her as a convict; at the same time, however, the consequences of his criminal act have forever marked the lives of other people, damaging them irreversibly. Where does justice lie between these two extremes, and who is really right to hate? These are the questions on which the film invites us to reflect, carrying on two reliable stories through their points of view and without giving an absolute answer.

The narrative proceeds in a reflexive manner for much of the tale, igniting in a crescendo of tension in the final part, attempting to give a jolt of energy to a largely predictable plot. The film is made interesting by the great acting performances of its protagonists – incisive in the rendering of real characters and always credible in their reactions – within a traditional and square screenplay, but which fails to stand out for its originality or innovation. Ruth Slater, closed in her emotionless shell, is played by a Sandra Bullock perfect in restoring the cracks that open in that wall of silence behind which the protagonist hides.

Even his supporting actors are truthful and contribute to creating the trustworthiness on which the story rests: Vincent D’Onofrio plays the lawyer who will help Ruth find her sister, Jon Bernthal is a colleague who seems to have feelings for her, while Will Pullen is the younger of the two brothers seeking revenge. The direction relies completely on the hand-held camera, returning the agitation in which Ruth Slater is forced, catapulted into an extremely noisy world in which she does not really exist. The shots live on numerous close-ups, in search of that reflexivity that the film manages to convey, framed by a photograph that faithfully reproduces the greyness that grips the life of a prisoner protagonist even when she is out of the penitentiary.

The Unforgivable Review: The Final Words

The Unforgivable is a film that invites us to reflect on the distortions of the judicial system, telling the story of a former prisoner in search of her sister. The dichotomy between guilty and victim is carried out with seriousness and without exaggerating in an attempt to give an absolute answer, managing to frame a thorny question with authority that will probably never be resolved. The plot is always credible in all its twists, well written and carefully directed by a direction that tries to return the protagonist’s agitation with the use of unstable shots. The screenplay does not include solutions that make it stand out for its originality but is completely based on the acting tests of a very thick cast, capable of noteworthy interpretations that turn out to be the real spearhead of the product.