The Offence

A harrowing and compellingly constructed chamber drama of police brutality and mental anguish, THE OFFENCE takes director Sidney Lumet's obsession with the policeman's conflicted position as his brother's keeper into the realms of the psychological thriller. Sean Connery is devastatingly desperate as Officer Johnson, a 20-year veteran of the police force on the trail of a serial child molester. As the film begins, Lumet immediately plunges the viewer into a climax of crisis and violence with Johnson at the center. With a shuffling and halting narrative, the events leading to Johnson's mysterious breakdown unfurl. When a young girl becomes the latest victim of the child molester, Johnson is unhinged after he finds the victim, naked and wounded in the marshes on the outskirts of town. Baxter (Ian Bannen), a teetering and dazed man, is picked up wandering in the center of town and becomes Johnson's primary suspect. The interrogation that follows is a swift descent into hell, as the torture of 20 years of police work slowly seeps out of Johnson's fetid soul and turns the questioning into a brutal verbal and physical showdown, seemingly to the death. (official distributor synopsis)