the audience applauded

The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

One of those movie experiences that is so good it makes you realize you've been grading everything else on a curve.

We watched this movie on Netflix streaming movies. It was made as a TV movie to run over a two hour time interval and as such has frequent fades to black for TV commercials.Neve Campbell is Kate Burkholder coming back to her small home community after being gone some 18 years. We only learn very gradually why she has been gone and why her family shun her. She has returned as Chief of Police. Shades of Margie in "Fargo."Only six months back, she and her department are confronted with a gruesome murder, the partially clad body of a young woman is found in a snowy field just a stone's throw off the highway. Kate immediately realizes she was an Amish girl.Kate was born and raised Amish but she left that life, therefore by Amish rules she had to be shunned. Even by her brother, Christian Campbell (her real-life brother) as Jacob (yaa-cobb) Burkholder, but they eventually have to work together to solve the crime.Another key character is old veteran C. Thomas Howell as elected Sheriff Nathan Detrick.This is a small movie with moderate production values but it has an interesting story, if not unique.SPOILERS: While investigating another is found dead, this time the young gymnast daughter of the Mayor. Kate manages to piece together a theory of why the serial killer had been inactive in the area for some years, she correctly figured out it was Detrick who had gone to Alaska for a while. Kate gets captured by Detrick, she plans to hang her upside down and bleed her out like all the others, but help arrives just in time.

Like the Harrison Ford movie "Witness" this television murder mystery set in the Amish community is a good watch because the community is so fascinating.Neve Campbell (why don't we see more of her than just Scream nowadays?) plays an ex-Amish detective investigating a murder in the Amish town where she grew up. There is a mystery about her departure from the community. Interesting to see her Amish dialog with the members who shun her for leaving.Also couple of faults: The solving of the murders in question ends in a rather formula predictable way. Also her detective romantic interest is a bit too plain and the romance isn't convincing. She's got more chemistry with her Amish ex.Read they were thinking of turning this into a series if the pilot was a success. I think it would be quite a unique show about a detective in an Amish community though I wonder how much crime there would be in that quaint rural place.

This movie was mostly boring, they left out a lot of important information from the book (including most of the relationship between John and Kate and what happened to John's family plus their drug and alcohol dependencies). They also did not include a few of the murders which might have helped to make this story more interesting. It might have helped if they stayed truer to the book, showed the relationship between Kate and John, showed what happened to John and how he ended up in this town (his supervisor trying to fire him for failing his drug test)and maybe gone into more the back story from the original murders and how they figured out it was the Sheriff who committed the crimes.I definitely recommend people read this book though, the series is rather interesting. Skip the movie if you have read the book, it does not do it justice at all.

A former Amish woman returns to the town of her birth as the chief of police in this 2013 film. She is soon caught up in murder, as a serial killer seems to have reappeared after a 15 year hiatus intent on creating further chaos.Our lady holds a dark secret, the reason why she left town so unexpectedly, leaving behind her fiancé.She faces shunning on behalf of the Amish living there. She soon meets up with someone sent to aid her in the case. Naturally, romance blossoms.You will be very much surprised by who the culprit is in these murders. I guess you can say-never say never.