The unforgivable is a drama that deals with a few interesting ideas about crime, forgiveness, and rehabilitation, before finally collapsing into another mediocre thriller. He also has what may be the worst twist of the year.

The film, directed by Nora Fingscheidt, is in theaters this week ahead of its Netflix release on Netflix on December 10. It’s a return to this streaming service for star Sandra Bullock, whose 2018 thriller Bird box– albeit forgettable – is one of the most popular Netflix movies in history.

Bullock plays a woman named Ruth, who has just been released from prison after 20 years. The story is that Ruth, who had custody of her much younger sister, was visited by a local sheriff about to evict them from their rural home in Washington. After the standoff, she shot him and killed him.

She was released from prison earlier for “good behavior” – odd, for a convicted cop killer – and returned to her hometown, hoping for a reunion with her sister. But many in town aren’t happy to see her, including the sons of the deceased sheriff and the sister’s foster parents. This sister, now about 25 years old and a classical pianist, has no recollection of the murder or of her sister.

Bullock later reunites with a lawyer (Vincent D’Onofrio) who lives in his old home, with his wife (an overqualified Viola Davis). It’s not often that you’ll see two Oscar winners performing together a scene as silly as the big scene of Bullock and Davis together.

This premise, of a convicted murderer suddenly out of jail and returning to an unwilling hometown, was also the plot of Rectify, an AMC series from a few years ago that covered just about everything. aspects of the storyline in a more compelling way. The Unforgivable is an adaptation of a British miniseries titled unforgiven.

The unforgivable is unremarkable shot, and not played well, despite the cast’s accomplishments. But it’s much worse in the third act, with the plot.

twist that undermines everything the movie had been up to then. It doesn’t help that a movie that came off as a serious meditation on rehabilitation and the limits of forgiveness so quickly crumbles into another mediocre thriller.

Towards the end, the film releases a slow piano cover of Radiohead‘s “Everything in Its Right Place”. He’s credited, I guess, with putting it in the movie itself instead of the trailer, but it looks like the movie tries to squeeze into an instrumental score by Jonny Greenwood, the Radiohead guitarist who has scored three different prestige films this year. .