Execution cannot be pardoned Bernadine Williams is a prison warden whose duties include preparing prisoners for the death penalty and attending the death penalty itself. Cold, restrained and impartial, she has repeatedly seen the death of the condemned, but even such a strong psyche has its limits. Watching another suicide bomber, quiet big guy Anthony Woods, whose appeals were rejected one after another, Bernadine realizes that she is experiencing professional burnout, and to see another, this time perhaps completely innocent person, dies is especially difficult for a woman.
The idea of this picture originated with the lady-director Chinoñe Chukwu 6 years ago, when it was inspired by the high-profile case of Troy Davis, accused of murdering a policeman and executed despite the contradictory testimony of witnesses and complete refusal to admit his guilt. Having spent these years on a thorough study of the materials of such cases, Chukwu did not create a legal agitation about the execution of an innocent African-American, but tried to consider how watching a series of human deaths affects the psyche of an outsider who is forced to watch such a terrible spectacle as a professional duty.
What can sometimes be blamed on is the excessive coldness and detachment of the narrative, somewhat distracted from a careful study of characters in favor of an extremely depressive thickening of colors and sometimes too straightforward in the implementation of the stated plot-forming idea. However, by the middle of the film, you begin to realize that this technique works, since the static camera, the ringing silence and the feeling of complete vital immobility, when it seems that even the air freezes around the characters, create a truly frightening impression that makes you guess what real people who find themselves in a similar situation can feel. Although Eldis Hodge is good here too, Bernadine’s experiences are a more complex spectrum of emotions to embody, Alphrey Woodard, who did a superb job and received a BAFTA nomination.
And if the lot of people executed with her fell considerable suffering, her heroine will be forced to suffer no less, because she will not return from her own mental prison, and what she saw will never be seen. It is no coincidence that home scenes sometimes look even darker than prison ones, where Bernadine will have to face painful memories over and over again and realize that justice often refuses to triumph. Perhaps there are individuals who can cope with similar duties only on a cold nose until retirement, so to speak, without taking work home, but if a person still has drops of humanism, as in Bernadine, he will be waiting for endless torture and torment and even dismissal with a subsequent change of activity here is unlikely to help.