The film is about Cokeville, Wyoming, a town of more than 500 people near the Utah and Idaho border. One day, in 1986, Cokeville made headlines in the national newspapers when a man and his wife entered elementary school with guns and assembled more than 100 children and teachers in a small room. Things turned out to be a bad path while each asked for a ransom of 200 million dollars for the lives of the children.
Writer-director T.C. Christensen ("17 Miracles") paces the tension of the first half sharply and handles the spiritual message thoughtfully as the lawman wrestles with his faith through his investigation.
Christensen weaves a few genuinely tense moments into his portrayal of the conditions inside the school, but the narrative faces a huge structural barrier in that the end of the crisis isn't the end of the movie.
