Absolution

Bettina Lloyd, a reporter struggling to make a career for herself on a New York magazine, finds herself obliged to accept an assignment that will take her back to her hometown in Ohio to investigate a report of a series of so-called medical "miracles". Her return forces her to face a mother with whom she has an estranged relationship, a father facing a future alone, a brother with a drinking problem... When she tries to examine the story, she is shocked to find that the root of the "miracles" lies with her former teenage romantic interest who has been comatose for over a decade and that his mother has been conducting medical cures by the laying on of his hand over the afflicted... But, surprisingly, the heart of the story is in Bettina herself...how she is forced to come to grips, sometimes through flashbacks, at times by being confronted by a growing crisis in her mother's health with the traumatic events in her young life which tore her away from her family...events which eventually are brought to the surface and resolved by the very situation which brought her home in the first place... Points to the acting, which gives us the right tough of honesty and believability without going over the melodramatic top.