INDIA
Indian Express
Written by Shalini Langer | New Delhi | Updated: February 19, 2016
“How do you say no to God?” A victim of sexual abuse by a priest tells a team of investigative reporters, trying to explain why what happened happened.
However, God here stands for other things too — the authority, the system, the closed-knit city clique, and what happens when you go up against them.
Spotlight is based on Boston Globe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning months-long investigation into sexual abuse by priests that went on for years with the complicit silence of the Catholic Church. By the end of the film, they have uncovered 70 such priests in Boston itself, and hundreds of victims.
McCarthy, who co-wrote the script with Josh Singer, knows the stark weight of that one sentence, and so attempts no embellishment. The film instead shines its light on the dark recesses where this truth hid.
It’s a gripping portrait of what happens when institutions decide they are bigger than the people who make them. It’s even a line the team of reporters hears, if not in so many words.
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