Top critical review
2.0 out of 5 starsdon't let your determination to be a forgiving Christian blind you to who someone is.
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 1, 2020
at the end, when myra says evil can be spiritual? I guess if date nights consisted of helping my psychopathic boyfriend torture and murder some kids and then burying their bodies in the romantic, moonlit moors of England, then I, too, might confuse the accompanying adrenaline rush with spirituality. i bet those terrified kids felt super spiritual, too. one with the universe, and everything.
what did I like about the movie? the acting was good. I like that they pointed out the ridiculous double standard of people not thinking of women as being evil or murderers. and that the male child-killers were released more often than female child-killers due to widely held beliefs that some men are just violent, so it doesn't make the news and no one ever hears about it when they are paroled. but when a woman kills, we never forget her, and they don't parole her the same way they parole the men. to which, my argument is, while it *is* unfair to judge women and men differently when it comes to parole for the same crime, I don't actually care if its a man or a woman who kills a kid; let them all serve life in jail, no parole for either male or female murderers. It seemed like the movie expected us to feel sympathetic toward myra because of this double standard, which is why it gets two stars. its just a ridiculous viewpoint. don't parole any of them, and the double standard wont apply. simple enough. of all the harmful double standards about gender we *should* address, the "unfair" parole of murderers doesn't deserve a second glance. let them all rot without parole.
about Longford being surprised that a serial killer also happened to be a manipulative liar? grow up. i felt zero sympathy for him. longford knew early on that myra was lying to him, as he learned that she ridiculed him in her letters to ian brady. don't let your determination to be a forgiving Christian blind you to who someone really is. you can forgive myra of her sins *and* simultaneously recognize shes a manipulative psycho, regardless of whose "influence" she was under. forgiveness doesn't mean pretend it didn't happen. it means recognize what she did, forgive her, and then keep the public safe from further harm by keeping her off the streets til she dies; don't parole her because you want to think of yourself as a forgiving christian. no need to torture her, just keep her away from decent people. this kind of thinking is dangerous, as soooo many people allow others to behave in horrible ways because we are called to forgive them. this is how dangerous people prey on forgiving people. you can forgive someone their sins, but it doesn't mean you have to continue a relationship with them. Longford cared more about upholding his religious beliefs than about common sense.
