On Christmas Day, many folks have a preferred movie they like to watch. The more traditional options are Miracle on 34th Street or It’s a Wonderful Life, while slightly more irreverent viewers may opt for Die Hard or The Godfather. Alison Star Locke, the director and writer of The Apology, might seek an entirely different audience: those for whom Christmas is a nightmare, and any family connection is met with a ruder dismissal than “Bah, humbug.” Set on Christmas Eve and primarily involving two characters with a disturbing connection, this is a dark, dark slice of holiday counterprogramming. It is also more thoughtful than you might expect, a kind of morality play that treats disturbing impulses with matter-of-fact solemnity.
At first, Locke suggests an air of realism by showing the physical toll the holidays require. Darlene (Anna Gunn) and her friend Gretchen (Janeane Garofalo) are exhausted by Christmas before it even starts, baking and prepping for family and friends right up to the last minute. After Gretchen leaves for the night, we see how the holiday is acutely painful for Darlene: her daughter went missing years ago, and although she started a support group for families with missing children, that offers little solace when she misses her kid.
Right when she is about to fall asleep, there is a knock at the door: Linus Roache plays Jack, a long-lost relative who surprises Darlene in more ways than one. He did not plan to drop by in the dead of night, except his car broke down in the snowstorm outside. The two begin an uneasy catch-up conversation, yet something is off about the whole encounter, and with good reason. Jack has an ulterior motive.
A long stretch of The Apology is effectively a stagey, locked-room two-hander, with Darlene and Jack jostling for the advantage in conversations that are, at times, quite painful. Jack is responsible for the girl’s disappearance and death, so by visiting Darlene, he hopes he can find forgiveness and a reprieve from the psychological toll on his conscience. If Darlene has made peace with her loss, then she can let Jack off the hook, right? Nothing in The Apology is that simple, which leads to moments of violence and torture punctuating the conversation. The nature of the evening is cyclical, with Jack and Darlene engaged in a power struggle, and yet Locke ensures it is never boring. There is always an edge of plausibility to each discursion, whether it’s Darlene’s thirst for vengeance or Jack’s pathetic attempts to portray himself as the real victim.
Left to her own devices and whatever implement/weapon she can use as leverage, Darlene has plenty of time to mull over what she wants from Jack. What does she want? What, exactly, does Jack deserve? She considers everything between imprisonment and murder, so by the time Gretchen returns to the fold, we think we have some sense of the outcome. Although The Apology ended up on the horror-centric streaming service Shudder, it is more of an actor’s showcase, with Roache and Gunn convincingly going through a ringer and conjuring intense imagery without the assistance of any flashback. Locke’s film is intense and provocative because it does not take an easy moral stance on vengeance, murder, suicide and forgiveness. Instead, it treats them as concrete options, each with strengths and drawbacks.
Audiences often do not like considering immoral conduct in such practical ways, which is why the film was dumped to streaming and has not built much of an audience since. But if you’re willing to plunge into its depths along its deeply troubled characters, the film heads toward a tough, satisfying conclusion it wholly earns.
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