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milesmiles
Reviews
Night Sins (1997)
Atmosphere.
"Night Sins" is one of my favorite mini-series of all time. There is some mystery about this even within my own mind, because intellectually I can tear it apart, yet emotionally it is irresistible to me. I just love this movie and never get tired of watching it.
"Sins" is the story of a brilliant but troubled SBI (State Bureau of Investigation) agent named Megan O'Malley (Valerie Bertinelli) who has been assigned to the small, seemingly ordinary community of Deer Lake, Washington, to work with the local PD, which is run by Chief Mitch Holt (Harry Hamlin). On her first day on the job, a boy named Josh Garrison is kidnapped, and his gym bag found with a tape recording which says, "Ignorance is not innocence but sin." The investigation which follows reveals that Deer Lake is, beneath its veneer of small town American normality, full of all sorts of dirty secrets, and just about everyone turns out to be a suspect, from the town priest to his assistant deacon to the husband of the missing boy to a local weirdo to Mitch Holt himself. Megan, who has a chip on her shoulder the size of Gibraltar, must navigate a web full of lies, half-truths and misdirection while trying to solve what starts out as a single kidnapping case but eventually turns into the investigation of a whole slew of unsolved disappearances going back decades. There's a conspiracy at work in Deer Lake, a town where, it turns out, you can't trust anyone...because no one is who they truly pretend to be.
"Night Sins" has many problems, most notably an uneven script, which leads to outbursts of bad acting, and a tendency toward TV-movie melodrama. These things are overcome by the lush, elegaic score by Mark (The X-Files) Snow, and creepy narration, provided by the kidnapper. And there are many fine actors involved too, including Mariska Hargitay, Jeff DeMunn, P.T. Vince, Colm Feore and Martin Donovan. But the key element , the thing that keeps me coming back to the series, is really the overall atmosphere of isolation, suspicion and paranoia the series generates, an atmosphere heightened by the fact the story takes place in the dead of winter. This is a mystery story, and a very good one, but the mystery is less important, really, than the sense that we are learning something about the difference between the veneer human beings put up in public and the things they do behind closed doors. We all have secrets, and we've all committed sins. The genius of "Night Sins" is showing how these things can be maniuplated to control us. Because nobody wants their sins exposed to the light of day.