Movie Reviews

The first season of Sundance Channel’s drama Rectify is finally out on DVD and Blu-ray over here. It’s a damn shame it took this long, because this show is absolutely worth watching.

After having spent the last 19 years in prison, Daniel Holden (Aden Young) is being released from death row after being convicted for the rape and murder of his then girlfriend thanks to circumstantial evidence and apparently, a confession. But new DNA evidence helped overturn his conviction, without completely exonerating him. So did he kill his girlfriend or not? We don’t know, and neither do the people in the small Georgia town he grew up in.

Rectify could have easily turned into a thriller, but instead creator Ray McKinnon (Deadwood) turns the focus on Holden moving back in with his family and him dealing with suddenly being a part of society again. It’s not just the town that is divided about this turn of events though, even his own family seems to be divided about Daniel’s release. There’s his sister Amantha (Abigail Spencer) who has never stopped fighting for her brother. Meanwhile his stepbrother Ted (Clayne Crawford) thinks Daniel is guilty and he doesn’t exactly welcome the intrusion in his life. Ted’s fervent Christian wife Tawney (Adelaide Clemens) however is not so quick to judge and takes an interest in Daniel. And then there's the prosecutor’s office who are still gunning for a conviction.

Rather than racing towards the finish line, McKinnon takes his time to juggle all these different elements. You can’t call Rectify plot-driven, because it doesn’t zoom in on whether or not the soft-spoken Daniel is guilty or even on how he’s coping with life after having been wrongfully incarcerated for nearly two decades and escaping death. Instead it seems content to show us throughout six episodes how Daniel takes it one day at a time and how that is already complicated enough. Some might find the show’s pace too slow, I found it one of the most exhilarating shows I’ve seen in quite some time.