Ben Affleck's directing debut, Casey Affleck's second knockout performance in a month (the first was as Jesse James' assassin), and source material by the author of Mystic River all qualify as fine reasons for catching this child-kidnapping mystery.
But there are plenty of subsidiary ones as well, including deft supporting performances by Ed Harris (as a hard-nosed detective) and Amy Ryan (as a piteously unfit mother), plus an ending guaranteed to leave audiences buzzing.
The case seems pretty straightforward at first, when private eye Casey Affleck gets hired by relatives of a child missing from his neighborhood to augment a police investigation. His local angle turns out to mean a lot, in ways I probably shouldn't reveal. Suffice it to say that the plot has surprises right through its final reel — and that the ending is a morally ambiguous corker.
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