When introducing Re-Creation at New York’s Tribeca Festival, directors Jim Sheridan and David Merriman mentioned a revelatory tidbit off-hand. When they set out to make the movie—which imagines a fictitious trial for a real-life murder—they weren’t quite sure what they were making. That’s probably because nothing quite like Re-Creation has existed up to this point. It is, in some ways, a fantasy rooted in the now omnipresent structure of Sidney Lumet’s jury drama 12 Angry Men. However, it’s equally a self-reflexive documentarian examination of the true crime genre and the ways in which people’s most intimate experiences shape their views on guilt and justice.
In its opening minutes, the movie quickly lays out its premise through a judicious combination of news footage, on-screen text and brand-new dramatizations. In late 1996, French filmmaker Sophie Toscan du Plantier was murdered outside her holiday home in County Cork. The prime suspect, English journalist Ian Bailey, was never formally charged in Ireland due to insufficient evidence but was finally tried in absentia by French courts in 2019, where he was found guilty of the crime. The film imagines a modern-day scenario where the case is finally brought to trial in the Irish courts, presided over by a European jury with Bailey in custody.
Sheridan directed the Irish courtroom biopic In the Name of the Father, while Merriman is best known for documentaries like Rock Against Homelessness, so Re-Creation exists at the nexus of their respective cinematic approaches. However, the film’s relationship to reality is made intentionally precarious, as Sheridan plays a character as well—the jury’s thorough, even-handed foreman, tasked with counting the votes and requesting evidence be replayed for them on a laptop screen. In the film, as in real life, he carefully considers each perspective on the case but never seems quite sure of his own.
As with Lumet’s 12 Angry Men and its many successors (most recently: Clint Eastwood’s Juror #2), the details of the trial are laid out in retrospect once a single juror expresses doubts about the others’ guilty verdicts. Like in Lumet’s classic, it’s Juror #8 (Vicky Kriepes) who voices her objection, albeit based on a nebulous sensation she can’t quite put into words. “Facts don’t care about your feelings,” retorts Juror #3 (John Connors), the film’s terse de facto antagonist who strongly believes in Bailey’s guilt. However, the seemingly gendered dynamic between them—a woman viciously shut down by a venomous, aggressive man, mirroring the dynamics of the case itself—quickly becomes more complicated than it initially seems. Before long, each character reveals the deeply personal reasons for their convictions, each stemming from their own family histories with violence and incarceration.
Before all the evidence is re-examined, Re-Creation gestures towards a top-down view of what justice even means in a system whose default setting is punitive. The film is only 89 minutes long, so it has neither the time nor the inclination to present lengthy debates on prison abolition. However, the mere invocation of this topic is enough to reframe the basic premise of this and similar stories in which the drama hinges on the ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ of locking someone up and throwing away the key. Is it satisfying? Perhaps. But what does it really change? The more important question the movie asks surrounds the nature of evidence itself and which elements of judicial proof—forensic or circumstantial, factual or remembered—are considered enough to form a coherent narrative of innocence or guilt.
The movie, although thematically cogent, is unevenly assembled at times, jumping and fading between scenes in jolting fashion as though not enough footage had been filmed. It also features hints of a larger courtroom narrative led by established actors (Colm Meaney as Bailey, Aidan Gillen as a prosecutor), which appears to have been trimmed within an inch of its life. Meaney’s silent, imposing presence in disjointed shots (alongside real archival footage) imbues Re-Creation with a throughline about the media circus surrounding the case and how the news’ similar presentation of him might have influenced his perception in the public eye.
In 12 Angry Men, revisiting the case gradually breaks down the jurors’ prejudices and predispositions towards the accused. A similar process takes hold in Re-Creation, though given the complexity of the evidence at hand—and its alleged mishandling by Irish police—the conclusions aren’t quite so cut-and-dry beyond the need for a more rigorous examination of the fictitious trial. What eventually takes center stage, as the jurors’ deadlock grows more frustrating, is the haunting unknowability of both the victim and the accused, a bridge the jurors attempt to cross by staging detailed re-enactments in the jury room. These scenes transform the movie’s very nature, taking it from a story about facts to—quite ironically—a story about feelings, as the characters become tasked with imagining each and every impulse and sensation that led to the gruesome events as the directors’ careful, grounded compositions give way to surprisingly expressionistic flourishes.
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RE-CREATION ★★★ (3/4 stars) |
The film, in this way, mirrors the allure behind the genre of true crime as a venue in which viewers and listeners project personal biases from deep, often unthinking places as they attempt to solve even the most unsolvable crimes. The most pressing dramatic questions, Re-Creation posits, are seldom the facts of such cases but rather the way their disturbing details function as a conduit for deeper neuroses—the recognition of which can yield a liberating catharsis if properly recognized. Despite its occasionally disjointed nature, it’s a moving and at times risky film that uses a grisly real-life murder to turn the lens on our fascination with true crime, revealing the often primal places from which its macabre allure tends to stem.