DeathPenalty Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Death is the ultimate dramatic device, but great art doesn't emerge from strong devices alone. In Take, the directorial debut of Charles Oliver, the impact of a single, startling tragic death immediately conveys the sense of watching a gravely serious movie, which is definitely the case. However, having immediately provided a tone, Oliver fails to follow up with a story powerful enough to justify it. That's not to say that the experience Ana (Minnie Driver) goes through after her son dies in a freak accident before the start of the film isn't relentlessly bleak, but there's hardly anything distinctive about the circumstances to make viewers care any more than they would if they were glancing at it in the morning headlines.

Still, Olilver has made a quietly observant work solely driven by the specific needs of two downtrodden protagonists with completely believable motives. In flashback, we learn that Ana struggled with her son's elementary school, which wants to put him in a special needs program. Meanwhile, she has a hard time communicating with her husband and finding decent work to get by. Elsewhere, reckless gambling addict Saul (Jeremy Renner) destroys his life in a whirlwind of debt. His misfortune, as it's shown in early scenes at a prison where Saul awaits execution, will lead him to accidentally murder Ana's innocent child, Jesse (Bobby Coleman).

Mansour (Hossein Yari) is guilty of murder, awaiting the decision of whether or not he will be executed. His fate does not fall in the hands of a judge, though. It falls to the family of the man he murdered; if they ever make it down to the prison to make the call. Under Iranian law in cases of capital punishment, it is up to the victim's family to either condemn the offender to hang or save him with their forgiveness, but they are required to appear on the day of execution to officially select their verdict. Mansour has already faced the day of his sentencing a few times, and each time the judgment has been postponed due to the family's absence. And so he continues to wait for his appointment with death.

Anyone familiar with existentialist Iranian cinema can predict how Day Break ends, but it doesn't really matter if Mansour lives or dies. He is like Schrodinger's Cat, simultaneously alive and dead and neither state all at the same time. Trapped in a form of limbo, he endures the psychological struggle with having an indefinite future and a definite lack of free will. The torture of not knowing, for Mansour, becomes far worse a punishment than death.