«The Righteous» is an amazing first film by Mark O'Brien, a 38-year-old Canadian actor, who since 2005 began directing and writing well-received short films. In making this first feature film, O'Brien demonstrates mastery of the elements that make up his work, while delivering a first-class performance on camera, that inspires the excellent cast.
The movie addresses two subjects that genre filmmakers often combine: religion and fear. Or more specifically, Catholicism and terror. But just as the formula is liked, it is also one of the subgenres that incurs the most in sensationalism, green liquids, spinning heads and the profane. Not here. «The Righteous» is a sober, original, and well-written film, which I would only question its propensity for extensive use of dialogue.
The protagonist is Frederic (Czerny), a former priest who hides a couple of secrets that lead him to a deep moral and ethical crisis when his adoptive daughter dies. His wife Ethel (Kuzky) is devastated, but he endures most of the unexpected tragedy, realizing that he has some "unsettled issues with God." The conversations with his priest friend Graham confront him; the visits from Doris, the dead girl's biological mother, stress him out; and finally, the arrival of a stranger at his house, 20 kilometers from the nearest town, alters everything.
Aaron (played by the director) does not remember how he got there, why he is limping, and although the couple fear and mistrust his presence at first, they end up accepting him... until Aaron asks Frederic to kill him.
The interest of what follows increases as the minutes go by, up to the ending, when the film reaches a paroxysmal and almost apocalyptic conclusion. It is true that, for an audience accustomed to superheroes, Disney or anime, the verbal exchanges of «The Righteous» could seem enigmatic, not helped much by the inclination of the dialogues towards the arcane to explain motives and reasons. But it is not fair to reject a film because it is not made to please a large audience, that resists reducing its components to the lowest common denominator so that everyone "understands".
It is a film of our times for a special audience, who will know how to recognize the trot of the four horsemen in the final scene, without seeing them or learning who they are. An audience that will remember that, at the end of the day, even the righteous will fall.
