‘The Unforgivable’ Trailer: Sandra Bullock Is an Ex-Con Seeking Redemption in Netflix Drama

Ryan Lattanzio
·2 min read
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Netflix has a stacked lineup of new fall movies rolling out this season, from “The Power of the Dog” to “The Harder They Fall” and “The Lost Daughter.” Joining the packed slate is Nora Fingscheidt’s “The Unforgivable,” starring Sandra Bullock as an ex-con hoping for redemption after being released from behind bars. The movie is written by Peter Craig, Hillary Seitz, and Courtenay Miles, and it’s based on the 2009 British miniseries “Unforgiven.” The film will be released in select theaters on November 24 followed by streaming on December 10. Watch the trailer below.

Here’s the official synopsis courtesy of Netflix: “Released from prison after serving a sentence for a violent crime, Ruth Slater (Bullock) re-enters a society that refuses to forgive her past. Facing severe judgment from the place she once called home, her only hope for redemption is finding the estranged younger sister she was forced to leave behind.”

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The cast also includes Vincent D’Onofrio, Jon Bernthal, Richard Thomas, Linda Emond, Aisling Franciosi, and Rob Morgan.

“My character is someone who has been incarcerated for 20 years for a pretty heinous crime [and] gets out,” Bullock, also one of the producers of the film, told Entertainment Weekly. “There are several people whose lives she affected by this crime she committed, and there’s a lot of hatred and anger and bitterness and sorrow associated with her release. She wants to find this one person, the only family she had when she went in, and you keep asking yourself, ‘Why can’t you let it go? This family member was traumatized by your actions — let it go! Stop harming these people all over again.'”

She added, “Finding out the background to the story of why she did what she did is sort of the whodunnit of this. It’s a murder mystery within a very complex character drama.”

Filming on the project started at the beginning of 2020 but was stalled by the pandemic. “We started shooting in February 2020, and then, as we all know, [by] mid-March, things changed globally,” Fingscheidt said. “We came back in September and, of course, when we filmed the second half, shooting was very different. We had to be super, super careful and learn how to work with COVID. For me, the biggest challenge was: How can we make it work so that later on, when you watch the film, you don’t think, ‘Oh, wait, that was pre-COVID and now that’s after COVID?’ All of the sudden, all the extras are spread out or, oh, it’s summer and [now] it’s winter, because we shot in Canada where you have very strong seasons. That was an extra challenge.”

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