Paradise Lost . Nashville Scene . 09-22-97

Paradise Lost

DIRECTED BY: Bruce Sinofsky, Joe Berlinger

REVIEWED: 09-22-97

This unflinching documentary from the makers of Brother's Keeper confronts the murder and sexual mutilation of three preteen boys, asking the viewer to deal with the possibility that justice will never be done. Reasonable suspects are found--three high-school outcasts with a bent toward satanic iconography--but filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky show that the accused may be physically and emotionally incapable of the crime, and that they're being tried because they are "different." The purpose of this film, though, is not to tell another "innocents wrongly accused" story. While raising doubts about the boys' guilt, Berlinger and Sinofsky also show that the teens are disaffected enough to have done something horrible. The real point of the movie is buried in the captions--none of the family members interviewed seem to share the same last name. Both the accused and the victims are the children of divorce, set loose from their broken homes to prey or be preyed upon. What begins as a movie about a crime becomes, in the end, a study of the parents left behind.

--Noel Murray

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Paradise Lost

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Paradise Lost

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