The Unforgivable (2021)

The Unforgivable arrives with the solemnity of a film that believes it has something to say about mercy, then spends two hours demonstrating that it mostly has something to say about rain. Sandra Bullock plays Ruth Slater, twenty years removed from a prison sentence for killing a sheriff who came to evict her and her younger sister. She takes two jobs, buys a truck, and searches for the sibling she raised and lost. Nora Fingscheidt directs with a gray, unblinking patience. Nobody in this corner of Washington is having a good time.

On the ledger of contemporary social consciousness, the film is nearly blank. Ruth's crime originates in an eviction, which lends the proceedings a faint whiff of class grievance, though the screenplay never converts that grievance into an argument. A woman directs, a woman stars, and the plot turns on a woman's self-erasing sacrifice, which registers as a somber character study instead of a thesis. Viola Davis and Rob Morgan appear in supporting roles and are simply people in the story, never asked to carry a statement. There is no romantic subplot of any orientation, no ecological anxiety, no commentary on bodies, neurology, or the historical record. The film has other business.

Where it could preach, it sulks. The melodrama is thick, the moralizing thin, and the audience is left to draw its own conclusions about forgiveness, which is presumably the point. The result is a well-acted, unrelentingly dour exercise that treats suffering as sufficient subject matter. It was watched by an enormous number of people and reviewed by critics with visible fatigue. We classify it accordingly: a cold, respectable near-zero, warmed only slightly by an eviction and a female director. The sommelier swirls the glass, finds nothing, and moves on.