IMDb plot summary: Emily, a tough NYPD cop, is sent to an orthodox Jewish community to investigate a missing person plus $720,000 in missing diamonds. To solve what becomes a murder case, she has to join the community.
Directed by Sidney Lumet. Starring Melanie Griffith, Eric Thal, and John Pankow.
A Stranger Among Us is a Sidney Lumet film about a female police detective investigating a murder in a Hassidic Jewish community. Since she expects one of the community members to be the murderer, she works with the rabbi to go undercover and live among the community in the hopes of solving the mystery. Along the waym she learns more about their customs their beliefs and even starts to develop some feeling for one of them. This felt to me like it was trying to be a slight variation on the movie Witness, but it wasn't done nearly as well. Our protagonist is extremely unlikable, not only in her flippant disregard for an entire community's beliefs and rituals, but also in her extremely bad decision-making as she's trying to pass herself off as one of them. She just comes across as not very intelligent and exceptionally bad at her job, and while we are supposed to see her as hot-headed I don't think we're supposed to see her as stupid. The movie does have some interesting scenes that talk about living in a space distinctly set apart from the culture and what makes that worth doing, but it's all infiltrated throughout with this incredibly unrelatable protagonist, which makes it difficult to get anything out of.
How it entered my Flickchart:
A Stranger Among Us < Gas Food Lodging
A Stranger Among Us < Rikki-Tikki-Tavi
A Stranger Among Us > The House with Closed Shutters
A Stranger Among Us < There's No Business Like Show Business
A Stranger Among Us > Courage Under Fire
A Stranger Among Us < Stardust Memories
A Stranger Among Us < Davy Crockett and the River Pirates
A Stranger Among Us > Stepsister From Planet Weird
A Stranger Among Us > Chaos Walking
A Stranger Among Us > The Bone Collector
A Stranger Among Us < The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
Final spot: #2979 out of 3560, or 16%.
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