THE APOLOGY (REVIEW)

Dir. Alison Locke

Reviewer. Martyn Wakefield

THE APOLOGY sees Anna Gunn come face to face with a long lost family member who arrives over the Christmas break as a surprise. Welcoming, she lets him in but something heavy bears on his heart and his arrival holds a sinister motive.

The plot is predictable and the outcome is no shock because of it however where THE APOLOGY stands tall is in its humanity in dealing with such a sore subject. It's not overly violent or scary but the scales of balance keep changing as they play against each other to uncover the truth.

What's baffling is that within the depraved act undertaken by Linus Roache's brother-in-law 19 years before, is why he would want to be so open with it now. The shame of such an act begs for more than an apology and any rationale response to such claims would be with violence. It's unfortunate but it's nothing we haven't already seen with the likes of DIG TWO GRAVES, SHUT IN, BLUE RUIN, HARD CANDY, all revenge thrillers with similarly grounded tone and yet pack a harder punch than is given here. Perhaps on purpose, given the film's approach to dealing with the matter of vengeance, but nonetheless is a less entertaining film for it.

Gunn plays victim and reacts with a gritty realism, preventing this from being another run of the mill revenge thriller but at the same time, it's obvious where the film is going very early on meaning the cat-and-mouse fighting with the audience feels redundant.