Sylvia, a 16-year-old girl, and her polio-stricken sister were fostered in a single-parent family with 7 children. The teenage girl was pregnant early, her husband ran away, she had no job, and the disease-riddled single mother Gertrude brought her 6 children. Child and a swaddling baby. She fears that her eldest daughter, Paula, will suffer the same fate as her in her unmarried early pregnancy, and she takes out her anger on Sylvia, an outsider in her foster home. She accused Sylvia of spreading lies, stealing, and indiscretion about her daughter, and inflicting verbal insults and corporal punishment on the girl numerous times. Beating with whips, burning cigarette butts, stuffing Coke bottles down, imprisoned in basements, not allowed to use toilets, indulging in tying up, beating, beating and abusing themselves and neighbors' children, and engraving on girls with red-hot pins "I'm a prostitute, I'm a prostitute. Proud" sentence, Sylvia was eventually abused to death. This is not another dark cartoon, this is a pseudo-documentary based on a real case that happened in Indiana in 1965, "Sin in the American Pastoral".
Ren has seen many CULT movies, and I despised the unreal me as soon as I saw the bright ending. I also hoped that the plot would stop. The moment Sylvia escaped from the basement with Paula's help and found her parents, the director showed us. With Sylvia's ghost standing in front of her own icy corpse on the ground, the hopeless ending of the movie is far more cruel than the plot - on October 26, 1965, the girl Sylvia was killed by Gertrude De, Gertrude's children and neighbors' children were jointly abused and died of cerebral hemorrhage, shock and malnutrition, of collective indifference and human morbid orgies.
The court sentenced Gertrude to life in prison for first-degree murder (actually a parole at the end of the 20-year prison sentence), and Paula and many of the children who had abused Sylvia were sentenced to life in prison to two years in prison. History allows the law to give people an explanation, but this only proves the existence of rules, and what is more, the judgment itself is just a broken fig leaf for morality and ethics, and those who need to be judged are more than those who directly hurt Sylvia? The parents who co-abused Sylvia's children turned a deaf ear when they learned of the incident, the neighbors who heard the screams cowered in fear, the children who played in the basement turned a blind eye, and hurriedly did not visit their daughters. His parents, a priest with a weak attitude, and Ginny, who was timid and let her sister be repeatedly hurt... It was the madness of the group that induced the hidden animal nature, and indifference and cowardice consolidated the huge accomplice system, creating this long-lasting Months of captivity abuse murder.
The dead have passed away, and what Sylvia has proved at the cost of her life is not just the cruelty and evil of human beings after losing their responsibility. What annoys me more than the mass abuse of girls is the silence and non-resistance of the abused. Maybe she thinks that if she doesn't resist, it will not bring more disasters and harm, maybe she thinks that not calling the police, not calling for help, or telling her parents is a strong manifestation of independently taking on the fate, and even she pinned her hopes on God, believing that enduring harm is good for life and peace. Trial of Faith. However, the weakness of the individual cannot resist the collective morbidity, cannot evoke compassion and sympathy, and can only escalate the atrocities again and again—even the abuser, who may have been hesitant and guilty at the beginning, hypnotized himself to believe this in the pleasure of torture. Everything is just a proper "punishment".
In the final scene of the movie, Sylvia's soul sits on the merry-go-round and says: God arranged all this, but I don't know why, maybe I should go and find my destiny. I said to her in my heart: You are here to remind everyone that silence is not strength, and forbearance is not a virtue. If people cannot control their own destiny, they will eventually be swallowed up by the evil of the ferocious world.
View more about An American Crime reviews