The Apology

After twenty years of sobriety a grieving mother finally learns the truth about what happened to her daughter who's has been missing as long as her sobriety by a very unlikely person who shows up at her home to confess to her everything that happened to her daughter. With a very small budget and cast, this was a decent and very quick story of a missing person reveal. I was actually ready to turn it off because I thought it was going no where but after the reveal of the daughter's demise, my interest piqued and I decided to stay engaged and watch to the end. A dialog film more than a visual meaning that you could easily just listen and not watch the film and still manage to follow the story without missing anything. Not sure why it fell under the genre of horror and thriller because it's neither. It's a suspense dialog in one place with a cast of three people done proper. And let me just add one more thing, some family members are absolute trash and sometimes end up being your worst enemy.

The Apology is a cheap movie and by that I don't mean just the budget. Sure it is a low budget movie but there are good low budget movies, unfortunately this isn't one of them. The story is very predictable, not well written in my opinion and the execution was just average. The acting wasn't that great either. Linus Roache, I can't say I'm a big fan of his performance, found it a bit bland and not convincing at all. As for Anna Gunn it was just average as well. Never been a big fan of her either. The Apology is the kind of movie I will forget everything about it by tomorrow and that's a good thing.

Darlene Hagen (Anna Gunn) is still struggling 20 years after the disappearance of her daughter Sally. Jack Kingsley (Linus Roache) comes by claiming car trouble. In fact, he has a dark secret to reveal. Her friend Gretchen Sullivan (Janeane Garofalo) joins the horrific gathering.

New filmmaker Alison Locke is trying to write and direct a low budget feature. I don't know how, but she got three solid actors to do this. They make this as interesting as possible. The script isn't much. It has one surprise in the first half and the second half struggles. It has no more twists or turns to keep the interest. Mostly, this concept needs a few additions to keep it going all the way to the end.

This isn't a horror film. It's barely a thriller. This is a generally a two person play they decided to film. The main character is hosting family Christmas after 20 years. She also lost her daughter, 16, 20 years ago who simply disappeared. Her ex-brother-in-law arrives unexpectedly, and this starts the drama. Unfortunately, the drama is a two person morality play of contrived dialogue and weakest of characterizations. This film triggers a lurid reaction to watch to the end, but only to see if any truth is found. Along the way, information that is meant to shock us is disclosed, and secrets are shared. All leading to the ending that is supposed to build faith in humanity? What I found was grief that goes without processing leads to dissatisfied and unhappy lives. Could have done something better with the 90 minutes.

I watched most of this film or at least tried to. It's an interesting premise I suppose, but it's also not in a lot of ways. The moment the guys (at the very beginning) car "breaks down" and she doesn't question it at all I knew the script wasn't going to be great.

It's basically a play format. A few characters and A LOT of dialogue. The acting is okay, but it just doesn't go anywhere and I personally didn't care about the outcome, the characters or really the whole story.

Overall, I can't give a full review because I got annoyed with all the yelling and arguing and fake tension I just turned it off to watch the Warriors game. We lost the game, but I won by ending the the struggle of watching this film.