USA’s The Sinner
Part 2
Directed by Antonio Campos
Written by Derek Simonds
* For a recap & review of Part 1, click here.
* For a recap & review of Part 3, click here.
After the surprising, devastating first episode, The Sinner continues as Cora Tannetti (Jessica Biel) faces the court after committing a brutal and spontaneous murder on the beach. She pleads “guilty” and prepares on facing the consequences of her actions. Detectives Harry Ambrose (Bill Pullman) and Dan Leroy (Dohn Norwood) watch on, as does the terrified husband Mason (Christopher Abbott). Now, Cora’s ordered to psychological testing, to see if she’s fit to stand trial.
After the court adjourns, Mason comes across a police officer he knows from back in the day in school, Caitlin Sullivan (Abby Miller). He tries getting info out of her, but she’s too professional for that. Inside, his wife gets a visit from Dt. Ambrose, who knows that she knows the man she killed, Frankie Belmont. Although she denies it. However, it’s like she’s resigned herself to being guilty. As if she believes she’s guilty, knowing something more than she lets on.
Flashback to her life as a girl. Her father rants and raves about not being able to sleep in his own bed. Clearly, their love life has suffered because of their sick child. Meanwhile, dad looks to be sleeping in bed with one of the other daughters, young Cora (Jordana Rose), only eight. And there’s something not quite right about it, either. Christ. So much ugliness in her past that’s yet to be uncovered.
Dt. Ambrose keeps on trying to suss out the truth. He talks to Frankie’s wife, Leah (Teri Wyble). Apparently the husband once told his friends about a girl with whom he had a relationship, something tragic happened. They had an “intense connection” but the girl was damaged. Later, an accident nearly ruined his whole life. Hmm, all about five years prior. This is interesting, ramps up the mystery to a serious degree. The intrigue’s already high, but now my Spidey senses are TINGLING!
Flashback to Mason first meeting Cora, the latter waiting tables in a nice little place. They talk a bit, he chats her up. After she’s off they go for a stroll together, getting to know one another, the usual first meet/date type of thing. It’s cute. Very sharp juxtaposition against where we are now. What this does is show us their connection, particularly we see why Mason’s so torn up. It isn’t like she wound up a serial killer. This sudden outburst of violence in her life is totally inexplicable to him, so to see their beginnings as a couple is kind of poignant.
We get a look at some of Dt. Ambrose’s rocky relationship with his wife (Kathryn Erbe). They go to therapy, but the separation between them is shocking. Not entirely surprising, still shocking. He’s not exactly the doting husband, having left her in the hospital once to go spray his plants at home. Even when she calls him out on it he’s poised to argue rather than admit he fucked up. Typical man blinded by his own bullshit.
Another flashback to young Cora, her aunt Margaret (Rebecca Wisocky) leaving a treat with her before leaving. They’re all together in vigil for her little sister Phoebe, sick, frail. We see the first semblance of a second life for Cora. Aunt Peg gives her a Delicieux chocolate bar, a little treat she takes to a secret hiding place. Where she’s got other items most likely from her aunt. She stashes them, so nobody will find her special items. Sort of how she’s stashed away all the secrets of her previous live, so deep down and in the dark that even her husband has no idea what’s gone on.
Those closest to her, then and now, they don’t truly know Cora.
In the interrogation room, Harry gets Cora to start talking. She met Frankie in a bar five years ago on the “Fourth of July,” though he went by a different name, J.D. They took some pills, drank, dance. The song she heard on the beach that day is the one he used to play endlessly. They had sex, of course. A couple weeks later? Pregnant. She panicked, not even having Frankie’s phone number. So then she finds out he gave her a fake name.
And she stepped in front of a car on the road. No longer pregnant, banged the fuck up in the hospital, she was still clinging – for a while – her religious upbringing. Before realising God’s shit. Cut to five years later, she stabs Frankie to death on the beach. All good, right? Well, Harry doesn’t seem convinced. Not yet.
Flashback to Cora and her mom Elizabeth (Enid Graham). The little girl kneels in the yard in the middle of the night, praying to God for her sister. The recurring theme is religious fanaticism. Mom found the stash, the chocolate bar. She says “one bite” could mean God will decide to let Phoebe die. Holy fuck. It’s like everything wrong with Cora’s sister is blamed on her, in some way. A life of having sin heaped upon her, sin that isn’t her own.
Another flash to Mason and Cora in bed together, what looks like their first time. Or at least the first time Mason is about to go down on her and she almost cracks his neck in half, squeezing her thighs around his throat. When he asks what happened, she replies: “I don‘t know.” Although we know, at least in part. There’s a terrifying trauma in there somewhere.
Caitlin, talking to Mason, lets slip bits of the story concerning his wife and Frankie, the secret history. Naturally, it rocks him. All the while Dt. Ambrose continues combing through evidence, to find a better answer. He goes to Carl’s Taproom, where Cora met Frankie. The bartender remembers her, though confirms a different man than Frankie being with her, also mentioning she was extremely drunk. Might be possible something non-consensual happened that night. Cora is absolutely not telling the whole truth.
The big news? Harry gets over to Frankie’s parents place. Turns out, their boy wasn’t even on the same coast as Cora that Fourth of July. Oh, shit. Moreover, the cops are coming up with more lies she’s told. They have to dig much, much deeper.
Another flashback to young Cora, her mom, sick little Phoebe. “You‘re not doing your part,” the hideous mother says. She makes Cora tell her sister she isn’t better because she’s “a sinner” and took the chocolate bar. This poor little girl grew up having to bear the brunt of all the supposed sins her parents blamed on her. That could really fuck a girl up.
Ambrose: “The truth is my job”
In the interrogation room Harry presses Cora harder than before. He’s getting pissed off about her lying. He even puts on the song she heard that day. You can see by the look in her eyes it dredges up horrible memories. Finally, she jumps on top of the detective, pounding him and screaming: “I‘m gonna kill you!” WHOA.
Mason comes to see his wife. He mentions J.D. and knowing him before they met. He’s also getting pissed. The person he pledged to love in sickness and in health won’t tell him the truth. This sends him off looking for J.D. in any place he can think, old buddies from his younger days. Uh oh. I feel something bad coming.
There’s also a tenderness we see in Harry, after he and his wife start their reconciliation. While they eat dinner a bird flies into their patio door. He picks it up, nurturing the bird and helping it fly once more. Not long later he also has an epiphany about Cora. She smashed him on the chest in specific places. Right where she stabbed Frankie. And she hit Harry the same amount of times she stabbed him, too. A pattern. She’s subconsciously repeating that pattern. I assume it’s got something to do with what happened to her as a girl.
But there’s really no telling. Cora is an enigma, wrapped in a mindfuck. Who knows what the key will be to unlock all her mysteries.
Honestly, the first episode was good! Enough to get me into the whole concept. This episode blew me out of the water. I never expected the twists that came here, nor the final little revelation Harry has about the wounds. Interested for Part 3. So much dark, dangerous stuff to explore.
Flashback to the day Robin Griffin (Elisabeth Moss) is meant to be married. That very day Johnno is arrested by the police. So they have the ceremony through the bars of his cell. Problem is Johnno was out having a bit of fun with a young blonde in the woods when he was picked up. His bride-to-be knows it, too. So the rumours of her walking away on her wedding day aren’t entirely true as others now see it. She walked away. Because of him and his untrustworthy cock, his unfaithful mind. Heartbreaking, considering all they went through up to that point. But not entirely unforeseen. Don’t forget, he let horrible things happen to her when they were young, in love. She took him back after all that, yet he was willing to throw it all away.
The great thing about Top of the Lake is it takes the whole damaged police officer angle and turns that concept on its head. We never get to see such a fragile, wounded cop played by a woman, at least not often, and certainly not this well written. A woman’s perspective is illustrated with such depth here, unafraid of getting dark, dangerous, not scared of exploring territory on the edges of morality. At times it’s almost suffocating: what I imagine it’s like to be a woman, day in, day out, unfortunately.
“We all look the same to you”
Later, Robin gets a call from Mary. They agree to meet one another. In a restaurant they meet: “I believe we share a gene pool,” the girl starts off with a funny quip. Although I think she’s insane for being with Pussy, there’s a maturity about Mary. The way she talks is very adult, and direct, too. It’s an awkward meeting, though the girl seems happy enough to be there with her mother. She goes on about getting married to Puss, which Robin questions, knowing the darkness of men and the vulnerability of young women amongst such horrific predators. One thing’s certain, Mary also understands her real mother, she knows there are reasons why women make the choices they do, it isn’t always selfishness like society (and men) wish to believe. Mom levels with her girl about being raped by three men. This is why she couldn’t bear to keep her child; the ugly story of far too many women.
What a fucking killer follow-up to the first episode of Season 2. Lord, is it ever good, this return to Top of the Lake. Really rounds out Robin’s character while offering up such new, exciting, dark, wild things.
So Jesse (Dominic Cooper) just found out Viktor (Paul Ben-Victor) is Tulip O’Hare’s (Ruth Negga) husband. He’s got the guy in the torture room, too. He even uses Genesis to get who he thought was his lady out of the room. As she reminds him of “Dallas” and asking if he wants to “go there again.” Hinting at a dark, dark place in the preacher’s former life.
I mean, normal life doesn’t suit either of them. Not Tulip, and certainly not Jesse who looks wholly miserable without a bit of criminality in his existence. But there’s also the fact they were both on different wavelengths. She likely didn’t want to jump right back into conceiving a child after just losing one, whereas he seemed to feel the only way to get past it, to get over the loss was to replace the child now gone.
It all broke down when Jesse stumbles across something stuffed in a vent at home: a bag filled with cash. She’s been working their old contracts again, after lasting only three weeks at her real estate job. She isn’t made for the straight life. He isn’t, either. But he didn’t realise that. However, we also see Tulip’s been lying, taking birth control without telling him. That’s a bit sad, though again: her life’s been shit. Still, I can’t help feeling they’ve both done each other wrong. Plus there’s the fact Jesse beats his friend in anger, terribly, showing off that dark temper we can already see is inside him lurking.
So what does he do?
Loved this one, filled in bits of backstory for Tulip and Jesse that I was hoping to see sooner than later. The writing in this series is great, because the characters come through so subtly, even without some of the flashbacks. Yet those moments give life to the actions, reactions, emotions of Jesse and Tulip in present day after seeing what they’ve been through. “Sokosha” is next week, looking forward to a bit of action as the Saint of Killers is hot on the gang’s trail.
Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy) and the lads are out to the countryside, headed to the fair after a bit of business with Johnny Dogs (Packy Lee), a Gypsy fellow. He’s there to see about a horse. They do a coin toss, and Tom wins. Then a few boys laugh at Arthur (Paul Anderson), which doesn’t sit well with him. “Their grandad was a King,” Dogs says. Before one of the men calls Tommy’s mother a whore. Thus a few blades in the caps are put to good use. No one’s gonna pull that shit on the Shelbys. They’re good fighters, too. Even without the dirty stuff I’m sure they’d come out on top. Each of has a go, from Tommy to Arthur to John (Joe Cole).
Campbell talks with Aunt Polly (Helen McCrory), who’s busy lighting candles in church for dead soldiers. He’s an intimidating man. He puts hands on her, then she lays a kiss on his lips; this intimidates him. He couldn’t possibly handle a strong woman like her. Meanwhile, the Inspector is looking for more than Communists, he wants to find what was misplaced. And he needs to talk to Tommy.
Pol starts wondering if Ada’s pregnant. She’s over a month late for her period. So now the aunt decides it’s time to take her niece out to a back alley doctor for an examination. Pol wants her to be rid of it, though Ada doesn’t want to do that. Neither does she want to tell who’s baby it is, or else Tommy and her brothers might be angry.
Campbell meets in a fancy dining room with Tommy, face to face. They size one another up before getting straight to business. They sit for tea and a chat. The Inspector has that prescription from Mr. Thorne’s flat. He wonders if the Shelbys are in bed with Communists, but Tom assures that the situation is finished, dealt with and done.
Freddie turns up for Ada, on order from Tommy. To take her and get out of town. The lad even gets on one knee proposing marriage. A happy family ahead of them instead of something infinitely worse like it seemed before. Except then Freddie says he’s staying, they’re not going anywhere. Getting married right there, Tommy be damned!
Daaaamn. Lots of things happening. Next episode is surely gonna pack a punch, on many fronts. The Shelbys are ready to rock, and Tommy’s fucking steering the ship every step of the way with a keen eye.
Fleeing in helicopter, Travis (Cliff Curtis), Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey), Luciana (Danay Garcia), and Jake (Sam Underwood) head for the Otto family ranch. Travis is, naturally, worried. He just reunited the family and quick as that, they’re torn apart. Their trip gets nasty when bullets fly through the window, someone below firing on them. Then Travis takes a bullet through the side of his neck. He goes into shock, opening the vehicle’s door. When Alicia tries helping she sees he also has a wound in his stomach.
Back to the hotel by the beach where the group fled in Mexico. The gates are teeming with people trying to get in, to see the doctor inside. The people remaining include Victor Strand (Colman Domingo), who calms the near rioting crowd. He claims to be the doctor, asking that the people be let in and given rooms. What’s he up to? You can bet he’s scheming, he’s always the planner.
So the Otto family, they’re “building a new nation” on the new frontier. Trying to make sense of a mad world. He acts like the Clark family are ungrateful. He doesn’t want to believe his son Troy is a fucking psycho, and y’know, I don’t fully trust either of the Ottos; except for Jake, who’s seemingly still a human being. But I do not like Troy, neither do I like anything about Jeremiah just yet. Nick’s got the idea, he doesn’t dig any of this stuff. Moreover, he’s blaming himself – he took Luciana to the base, Travis and Madison they went looking for him there. Poor guy, I hope he doesn’t let his old addictive habits crowd his mind again.
The helicopter crew ready themselves to walk for the ranch. “It‘s a terrible world, isn‘t it?” Jake quips to Alicia, who even without response probably agrees wholehearted. They soon get to the ranch carrying Luciana, barely conscious in their arms. Then, daughter is forced to explain to mother where her husband has gone, why he hasn’t come back. A devastating moment.
Intense episode, all around. Wow. I cannot wait for the next episode “TEOTWAWKI” because I just know… Travis can’t be dead. He survived too much in that pit to simply die this way; by law of the TV gods!
Lucile Hadžihalilović is a gem of a director and writer. Her work may not be accessible to every single viewer. That doesn’t mean it isn’t worth the time to explore. Her first full-length feature Innocence came to us over a decade ago, the story of a relatively ambiguous yet dangerous process, the grooming of girls at a boarding school for adult life.
The story is set in a seaside village populated solely with women, maybe in their mid-30s, and young, prepubescent boys. At first, there’s a quiet, idyllic quality about the place. You almost feel a tranquillity wash over everything. Without all that machismo and testosterone of a world filled with men, machines, noise, so on. But we get to a point where the nasty underbelly of the village is exposed, and discover the women aren’t the mothers of these boys, though they say so. They’re actually experimenting on the young boys. During the night, the women write naked, moaning together in the sand. By day, they watch videos of C-sections and implant the boys with medicine, force feed them nasty gruel, all in order to get them pregnant.
Ultimately, Hadžihalilović plays on the male fear of someday being treated exactly how women, particularly girls, have been treated since time immemorial. So many scenes take us to the limit, as we’re forced to watch these young boys, Nicolas especially, experience unnatural reconfiguration of their bodies. At the end we find out the women have abducted these boys from an industrial, modern-looking world, starkly in contrast to their simplistic and primitive village. The movie works as a futuristic fairy tale, an allegory about the male anxieties surrounding many men’s worst nightmare: what if we had to go through everything a girl goes through in order to, by society, be considered a man like they must do for us to see them as a woman? For women, beginning at a much too young age as girls, one thing is for sure: your body is not your own. Boys, men, this is a given; we own our bodies. However, the girls haven’t had it that simple. Evolution sees a sci-fi twist on gender roles to make those male anxieties come alive in a terrifying way.
I’m not sure what the true, overall message of Hadžihalilović’s film is, and after seeing the film a couple times I don’t know if I ever will, not positively. Evolution absolutely explores gender roles, though I can’t tell to what end exactly. Male anxiety is one thing, but there are many elements at play in this cryptic screenplay.
