Reservation Road
This is a simpler Prisoners, or Mystic River by the Sea. The protagonist steps back from the brink miraculously, the actual outcome might as well be anything else.
It’s so simple and melodramatic, they amp up the individual scenes a lot, they should have toned it down for better effect. There’s got to be a shitload of things left in the cutting room, why is Bill Camp playing a cop with a single line? Many plot threads are introduced and then just end, so that main one remains continuous.
The main characters are not so dissimilar to heighten the tension. One is a journalism teacher, happily married with two overachiever kids. The other is a divorced lawyer which wants to be with his only child, but gets into fights with his mother all the time.
Since the Red Sox games went late, the lawyer is coming back to drop the kid off in the mother’s suburbs. The other family went to a big classical music recital, where the kid took part, everyone is happy, no biggie. The kid got a jar of fireflies from a friend, and was about to set them free, when the lawyer swerves and runs over the kid! He’s dead, Jim.
The lawyer thinks long and hard about it, but runs away nonetheless. His child had no seatbelt, bumped into the dashboard and cut his lip. As for the other family, it’s utterly devastating.
The lawyer calls the cops, but chickens out at the last minute, several times. As the days go by, turning himself in gets harder and harder. His own kid gets suspended from school from fighting with some kid, which he justifies by saying he was a “coward”, something he takes personally.
The teacher goes nuts, he gets clingy to the child’s stuff, goes online to talk with support groups that fan the flames of revenge, and starts ignoring his wife and (alive) girl. The girl’s music teacher is the lawyer’s ex wife, so they even start seeing socially, that’s tough for our negligent killer.
In another school shindig, the teacher recognises the cap-wearing lawyer as the SUV killer, but he doesn’t go public yet. He invites him to the scene of the crime, to grill and imply he knows about him, and might one day snap and kill his family. But the lawyer doesn’t budge.
Eventually that actually happens, the teacher gets a gun, a photo of him kid from the ex’s house, and threatens him in his home! The kid is there, so all scuffles are moved to a shoreline park. No shots are fired, but when the killer comes clean and nearly blows his own brains out, the teacher has an epiphany and gets cured of his PTSD blues, he gets back to his family.
The other guy presumably turns himself in, while his kid gets the pre-recorded message about parental abandonment.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.