If I think back on The Crossing Guard , also about the death of a child, all I remember is a sombre darkness and the camera playing across Nicholson's life-battered features. Penn's The Indian Runner , about a soldier returning from Vietnam to trouble in the family, was dense, moving, less sombre but a movie with substance. With an offbeat stroke of daring, he also cast Charles Bronson in a sympathetic role, and it worked. It's among that craggy-faced actor's best performances. It's not that dark and dense.
Winter turns to spring.
I don't know Durenmatt's novella on which the film's based, but he does tend to be an intellectual writer, calculated, a bit cold. The film's that too. After a while, though, one also becomes too conscious of the camera movement, of vistas of light and darkness being created. However, don't expect the conventions of the detective genre. This is art with a capital A. Penn's directing ultimately stifles in its own craft, its own sense of the profound.