Important, but extremely depressing

Rating: 7/10 (27 December 2017)

This is one of the hardest types of movies for me to review, because I think it succeeded in what it wanted to do - making an unsettling movie to bring attention to an important situation. In that, it succeeded, but in being a movie I would ever recommend or watch again? I certainly wouldn't.
This is a very real depiction of a depressing life situation in Mississippi which heavily focuses on racism. Like many other serious but devastating situations, I of course am aware of them and think they're important to address, but would not volunteer to watch it take place. This movie was very hard to watch as you just truly felt the dread and the pain of the black family from beginning to end. The amount of times that the father has to just say yes and go along simply because he's black is just stomach turning.
Unfortunately, there really isn't any hero here. It's a hard watch with a hard ending. Where you will crave justice for the mistreated black family (like in Django Unchained), you simply get a mildly satisfactory murder of the racist grandfather who was asking for it the whole time. I think this would have been a lot more satisfying had "pappy" been the only one to attack Ronsel and cut out his tongue, but alas it was a group of racist people in KKK outfits. So at the end are you happy that he died? Of course. However it feels hollow because they made it so blatantly obvious that there is so much more hatred out there and that their lives didn't change at all. It also could have just as easily been an angry son murdering a horrible father.
I know this is history, and not fiction, so it's not like I expected some switch to be flipped and everyone accepts everyone else. Just be warned if you're sitting down excited for a good movie, this is good in that it succeeds in being disturbing. I did walk away from it with a deeper understanding of the pain of living in those times, and it compels me to do more now. This is obviously good. But as a movie, it's a really rough experience - if you know that going in hopefully you'll be prepared.