Unhealed Wound – Unhealed Wound

Man in Full–Empty and Unhinged

Written by Diana Paul on September 2, 2024. Posted in Television reviews, Unhealed Wound.

Based on Tom Wolfe’s book of the same title (1998), Man in Full crosses genre. Charley Croker, a “Succession” type aging patriarch like Logan Roy, still basks in his former football star fame although he is now a mega real-estate developer and womanizing magnate with an oversized, explosive ego. (Sound familiar?) Croker’s emotional dial tone is contempt for everyone who does not shine a light on him. Now on the verge of bankruptcy from overleveraging and excessive borrowing, banks are calling in hundreds of millions of dollars of loans and Croker’s extravagant lifestyle...

Under the Bridge–Beyond Mean Girls

Written by Diana Paul on August 26, 2024. Posted in Television reviews, Unhealed Wound.

A true-crime thriller mini-series, Under the Bridge is based upon the 2005 titular book by Rebecca Godfrey and the memoir, Reena: A Father’s Story by Manjit Virk. A brutal murder takes place in 1997 in Victoria, British Columbia. The victim is a fourteen-year old girl, Reena Virk (Vritika Gupta) whose middle-class parents are Indian immigrants and Jehovah Witnesses. As a new arrival, Reena wants to fit in with other teens, especially the “popular” girls housed in Seven Oaks, a nearby foster home. Most of the foster girls are from extremely dysfunctional...

Holdovers–No Home for the Holidays

Written by Diana Paul on August 4, 2024. Posted in movie reviews, Unhealed Wound.

Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers is a film in the style of “Dead Poets Society”. Set in a New England prep school, Barton Preparatory, sometime in the 1970s, the predominantly white students dominate what the school administration can do. A curmudgeonly, lonely instructor, Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), draws the short end of the straw and is forced to remain on campus during Christmas break to babysit the handful of students with nowhere to go: “the holdovers”. Although his self-constructed reputation has been to prepare the coddled, spoiled miscreants for a world...

Two Sides of the Abyss–Cat and Mouse

Written by Diana Paul on July 29, 2024. Posted in Television reviews, Unhealed Wound.

A disturbing German psychological crime thriller, Two Sides of the Abyss (2023) opens with an obsessive, grieving police officer, Luise Berg (Anne Ratte-Polle), determined to re-incarcerate the murderer of her teenage daughter. Berg is outraged that Dennis Opitz (Anton Dreger) has been released early from prison. His psychiatric evaluation suggests he is completely rehabilitated. Berg believes otherwise and is obsessively driven to achieve justice. Other murders occur shortly after Dennis Opitz’s release, including a brutal murder in a trailer...

What Happened to Monday?–A Weekly Menace

Written by Diana Paul on April 29, 2024. Posted in movie reviews, Unhealed Wound.

The year is 2073,. Overpopulation and limited resources, especially food and fuel, have created a mandatory one-child policy called “The Child Allocation Act”. What Happened to Monday explores what such a world would look like with an autocrat as leader and mandatory enforcement with surveillance required for all citizens. In the opening scene Terrence Settman (Willem Dafoe) is grieving watching his daughter die in giving birth to septuplets: seven identical baby girls (all of them portrayed by Noomi Rapace best known for “Girl with the Dragon...

Woman in the Wall–Imprisonment in the Magdalene Laundries

Written by Diana Paul on April 14, 2024. Posted in movie reviews, Television reviews, Unhealed Wound.

Set up as a six-episode thriller, Woman in the Wall is based on the horrific exploitation of teenage girls and young women in “the homes for unwed mothers” in Ireland. The scandal of the Magdalene Laundries has damaged the Catholic Church for over a century and a half. This fictionalized account focuses on Lorna Brady (Ruth Wilson of “The Affair”, “Luther”, “Saving Mr. Banks”, “Dark Materials” among many others) and her determination to find her now thirty-year old daughter who was taken from her at the Magdalene Laundries....