Hitting cinemas across Australia starting today, drama-laden film The Unforgivable – starring Academy-Award winning actress Sandra Bullock in the lead, will take viewers on a journey of a woman who is attempting to brave the real world and rebuild her life after serving a sentence in prison after committing a violent crime.
Additionally starring Emmy-Award Nominee Vincent D’Onofrio and Academy-Award Winner Viola Davis, the Nora Fingscheidt directed movie derives from the 2009 British miniseries titled Unforgiven, by Sally Wainwright.
This isn’t the first time that Sandra Bullock has starred as a woman on a mission, with her brilliant performance in Bird Box showing audiences the true depth of her acting skills, skills which are once again on display for The Unforgivable.
For the lovers of drama mixed with true crime, The Unforgivable will see Bullock trying to rebuild her life following 20 years behind bars for killing a police officer in order to protect her sister. During her journey, she searches for her long lost sister. On top of finding it difficult toreintegrate into society, her past torments her, and she feels judgement around every corner.
Talking with Entertainment Weekly, Bullock notes that The Unforgivable dives into both drama and mystery, putting forth a thrilling tale.
“My character is someone who has been incarcerated for 20 years for a pretty heinous crime [and] gets out,” she began. “There are several people whose lives she affected by this crime she committed, and there’s a lot of hatred and anger and bitterness and sorrow associated with her release.
“She wants to find this one person, the only family she had when she went in, and you keep asking yourself, ‘Why can’t you let it go? This family member was traumatised by your actions—let it go! Stop harming these people all over again.’”
With the trailer shining light onto the difficulties that character Ruth (Bullock) faces, it’s also fraught with the unknown, with it opening by Ruth receiving a phone call shortly before her release from prison with the sinister words, “You’re gonna pay for what you did.”
After her release from prison, the threatening calls don’t seem to cease, and they cause her to have flashbacks to the crime she committed, all the while trying to reach her younger sister, Katie, while others are passing judgement based on her past crime.
Liz Ingram (played by Viola Davis) challenges Bullock’s character alongside her husband John Ingram (played by Vincent D’Onofrio) about the white privilege that allowed Ruth to survive murdering a police officer, arguing that if either of their character’s children wouldn’t have survived the altercation.
With Sandra Bullock at the lead, a cast that brings the drama to the forefront, and a plot that is filled with tension, threatening themes, and distressing situations, The Unforgivable is set to be exhilarating in cinemas, perfectly suited to the big screen and booming sound systems that a theatre can provide.
With The Unforgivable looking to be a highlight of Bullock’s career, she states that the rest of the cast really has lifted her up: “I don’t care where you think you are on the level of talent on your acting scale, if you place yourself opposite those who are far better than you, they will only elevate you. I was so scared. I was basically making a silent film for my character, and I was like, ‘If I fail with my emotional inner life, we’ve lost the storytelling.’ But I would get opposite these tremendous human beings and you just go ‘thank you’ to be opposite talent like that. Everybody dreams about it. And then here we had it.”
The Unforgivable is out now in Australian theatres.
