Eastwood and his actors create a brooding drama whose events and interrelationships seem surreally improbable yet painfully authentic.

It is a film of magisterial, slow-burning power, one of the finest examples of recent American cinematic storytelling and certainly Eastwood's most mature film.

Powerful performances in graphic story. Only 16+.

At first one might assume the film has been set up to be a tense crime thriller. Instead it is a tragedy: the end result is inevitable from the opening scenes. The characters never express any possibility of doing something else.