Film Review

In its informational material for mental health volunteers, the American Red Cross recommends that traumatized survivors of catastrophes be helped to understand that they are having “a normal reaction to abnormal events.” Indeed, my experience is that this is a very helpful intervention. Yet we may ask, what is a normal reaction and what happens when there is a “new normal”? These questions come to mind while contemplating In the Bedroom and the reactions of Matt and Ruth Fowler to the murder of their only son, Frank. The American parents of a young woman killed in South Africa reacted by flying there to forgive her killers and help found an amnesty program for perpetrators and victims of past atrocities. This does not immediately strike us as a normal reaction. The Fowlers' reaction seems much more normal: When the legal process fails them, they decide to kill their son's murderer.

This, however, is far from a straightforward revenge movie. Through a deceptively simple plot and powerful acting, writing, and directing, we are led into the inner sanctum of family life and into a psychological situation familiar to any psychoanalyst and student of Greek or Shakespearian tragedy. Familiar themes, however, are presented with a twist. Here, the primal scene is not the child's viewing of parents' sexual intercourse, but parental reactions to a son's sex life. Our Hamlet here is not the guilt—ridden ambivalent son of a murdered king, but the tormented father of a murdered son.

The setting is Camden, a picturesque, idyllic looking small town on the coast of Maine. The bedroom of the title refers to the inner section of a lobster trap. A lobster enters into the living room and is ultimately trapped in the inner chamber or bedroom. Matt shows a child a lobster that has lost a claw. That's because he was trapped in the bedroom with a female carrying “babies.” Such a female “can take off two men.” Indeed, in what follows it is a young mother, Natalie, who causes the