In life, people hide behind walls. People lie so they can protect other people. People also put their life in danger to protect other people. Often the people who we choose to protect are the people we love. That is what happened to Ruth Slater who is played by the talented, Sandra Bullock, in the movie, The Unforgivable which is directed by Nora Fingscheidt. She chose to protect her sister Katherine from being incarcerated by incarcerating herself. The Unforgivable was was shared with the world when it was released on November 25th, 2021.
Ruth always labeled herself as the murderer of the police officer she was falsely convicted of killing even when released from prison throughout the movie. Her love was strong enough to make her give up her reality that she is innocent so she could ensure that her sister got the chance to live a happy life.
Ruth is a fighter. Once she walks out of prison, she works overtime at a fish factory job and helping to build a new building. Her perseverance is shown through her constantly drilling into the walls, pushing her body back up when a woman at the fish factory pushes her onto the floor. It is implied through her working overtime that Ruth doesn’t care about her well-being. The only person’s wellbeing that it is shown she cares about is her sister Katherine’s well-being. This is indicated by Ruth consistently making efforts to call Katherine and eventually obtaining a lawyer to try to visit her.
The Unforgivable is an extremely sad movie that inspires me to persevere through tough times in life. Every scene is raw with emotions that Ruth struggles to not let overtake her, as she attempts to live a normal life after being in prison for 20 years. The potency of the movie burned through my body with heaviness because I was inside of my living room sitting on my couch, watching it on Netflix on the TV, so I could let out my different emotions that I would typically hide in public.
Ruth was constantly in a hurry from place to place throughout the movie and she was never overly dramatic in the different scenes, which made it feel very real. In a lot of movies, the actors or actresses overemphasize their emotions and get into the role of “this is not real life.” However, the way Sandra portrayed Ruth with just raw emotions of “I need to move on despite my past when at work and use my anger to keep working hard so I overwork myself, and I need to keep trying to find my sister” truly captures a person dealing with trauma, but not having time to breathe. Many people believe that when a person goes through a lot of trauma as Ruth went through by being in jail, that a person would just break down and do nothing, but the thing is, is that when you go through years of repeated trauma, you often find yourself feeling like you need to constantly push yourself to the point of exhaustion but you don’t care that you are exhausted because you don’t care enough about yourself to give yourself a break, and you also feel like, if you stop persevering, all of the people who hurt you are right about you, which in Ruth’s case, she would feel like they would be correct that she is a criminal.