A Life Interrupted (2007)
After Debbie Smith was raped, she didn't take the law into her own hands. She wrote the law... Based on a true story. In 1989, Debbie Smith was living a quiet life as a housewife with her police officer husband, Rob and their two kids, but one day it's all shattered. While her husband slept upstairs, Debbie was dragged from her kitchen in broad daylight and brutally raped in the woods. After going through the dehumanizing rape-kit, she waited with fear and paranoia. Six years later, her rapist was caught through a chance DNA test. After learning how many rape-kits go untested and how long women wait to get justice, Debbie makes it her mission so no more women will suffer the long wait to get justice.
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As Good As It Gets
This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.
The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.
All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.
I just wanted to mention one thing. Someone said that this movie didn't deserve 10 stars for "making the rape scene itself look too pleasant, going for soft-core porn titillation instead of the hard reality of violation." I wholeheartedly disagree with this assessment. I like that it was "softer" (if you can call rape "soft!) because it just goes to show that rape is not necessarily violent. Every movie I've ever seen with a rape scene has been extremely violent, and this one is very good at showing that it's very often NOT violent. I like it because sometimes, someone can struggle with rape, wondering if it really was rape or not. If it's sex against your will, it's rape. Period. As difficult as it is to watch a rape scene, this could actually help someone who is struggling with this very issue. Very well done.
A lot of Lifetime's TV movies get overly preachy when they take on social issues. Not this one. This is a superb human drama that expertly combines two story threads: the trauma that Debbie Smith faced from being raped and her involvement in the struggle to increases the resources available to local police departments to run DNA tests to identify rapists even when no suspect has actually been identified or taken into custody. This film brings us Debbie's trauma and how her rape hurts not only her but her family as well, turning her off to sex with her husband (the scene in which she freaks out in bed because he's inadvertently used an endearment that was also spoken to her by her rapist is especially chilling) and even being exploited by her children's schoolmates as an excuse to tease them. Stefan Pleszczynski directs in a calm, straightforward style that makes the material far more chilling than it would have been in the hands of an artier director; his only miscalculation (and the reason I'm not giving this film a perfect 10) is making the rape scene itself look too pleasant, going for soft-core porn titillation instead of the hard reality of violation. Still, that's a small blemish on an otherwise great production that shows off Lifetime at its best.