The Overnighters

Drafthouse Films | Release Date: October 10, 2014

7.5	USER SCORE Generally favorable reviews based on 14 Ratings

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KboyOct 22, 2014

This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. The director and main figure (the pastor) in the film showed a near-sociopathic indifference to the dignity and humanity of the wife of the pastor. Both of these parties arranged to film the pastor's wife while she was told something devastating to her, to her marriage, and to her three sensitive and intelligent children. This is profoundly inhuman. How rich that the pastor tried to reduce the import of that disclosure by saying "I realize I've put you in a difficult spot." Spot? How about landscape, or abyss? Even given that a perceptive audience member might discern all along that the pastor's disclosure would have to be in the stars, whether on-screen or off, the wife of the pastor was, on some important level, completely taken aback and devastated by this FILMED disclosure. Both the pastor and the filmmaker *arranged* to surprise her in this way--whatever can be claimed about releases that she may subsequently have signed. Her signing a release does not mitigate the wrongness of filming her in the first place! We have all run across people like the pastor in the film, people who mysteriously position themselves as the "central character" in a church, a family, or a film--people who, like a slowly subtly sinking ship, are willing and able to sink all associated other-humans in their spiraling wake. The pastor suffered greatly, had many good qualities, and was at least discernible as questioning his own actions and motives, even if doing so was typically intertwined with grandiosity. But the *filmmaker* could have refused to engage in the dehumanizing and unethical act of surprise-*filming* this pastor's devastating disclosure to his wife. Instead, the filmmaker seemed inspired to engage in the same sort of sociopathy exhibited by the main "character"-- as if indulging one's hunger for success and attention trumped all human obligation. The result is a bad film (when a strong film could have been made of the project). Sometimes it doesn't pay, on any level, to act unethically.… Expand

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