The Good Mother

Not a bad film, just a dull and inconsequential one. here today and gone tomorrow.

It explains a lot to you, and it does in fact have this twist -- and it's going to do anything it needs to do to get there.

The Good Mother starts with a gunshot and ends with a whimper.

Hilary Swank looks like she’d rather be anywhere else than starring as a grief-stricken mother in this overblown, undercooked drug drama about America’s opioid crisis that makes its scant running time of 89 minutes feel like a tortuous eternity.

The screenplay strains for topicality, stuffing too many elements at once into this sad story in a bid for relevance that never quite resonates.

The Good Mother takes a few unconvincing turns as it settles into routine thriller territory, more suited to a weekly television series than a feature film.

The film stumbles into a ditch of absurd twists, forgetting characters that seemed important, and manipulating motivations and coincidences, all to build an intrigue that turns out to be nothing more than a ruse. [Full review in Spanish]

If the conventional structure can be detected ahead of time by the seasoned viewer, the film still offers an intense and captivating look at the dark side of motherhood and the complexities of crime and justice. [Full review in Spanish]

Remind me&#59; which one is the "good" mother, exactly? Marissa is still wallowing in widowhood and is largely distant from her kids when Michael gets killed, while Paige is doing her best to pick up the pieces and get to the bottom of his murder.

The whodunit is too simple but Hilary Swank delivers assured notes of anxiety, the cinematography is great, and the script underscores the opportunity costs of chasing clicks, connecting a crumbling infrastructure of information gathering to civic health.