Writer-director Jonathan Meyers grapples with questions of faith and responsibility in this crime drama set in a Catholic boarding school.
Seminarians and students alike know Luther Scott's (Chris Pine) dorm ris the place to go for a good time at St. Michael’s Prep. Despite the nagging of his goody-goody roommate, Robbie Willingham (Lukas Behnken), Luther does a brisk and lucrative trade in liquor booze, drugs and pornography. Unfortunately, Father Thomas Parker (Bruce Davison) happens to walk in on one of Luther's beer blasts while giving Senator Givens (Robert Pine) and his son an orientation tour of the school. The institution loses a hefty donation and Parker initiates proceedings to expel both Luther and Robbie, making sure he finds corroborating testimony so the charges will stick. His witness, unpopular David Bennet (Adam Bussell), becomes a marked man when the vengeful Luther figures out who snitched on him. Late one night, with Robbie in tow, Luther disguises himself as a priest and chases David. A scuffle ensues and David falls off a balustrade to his death; a gardener spots a "cleric" near the crime scene. Suspicion falls on ethics professor Father Michael Kelly (Cameron Daddo), who often lectured Luther about the concept of personal responsibility. Luther confesses his secret to Kelly, who embraced his vocation as a way of atoning for an adolescent misadventure and feels obligated to keep his counsel. Detective William Fletcher (Peter
Greene), still traumatized by his adolescent years at Catholic school, hopes to nail the taciturn priest and Luther must make a choice: Save his own hide or clear Father Kelly.
For Meyers, conscience is a by-product of belief in a higher power, one of several philosophically weighty matters that inform this sober psychological melodrama. As the wheeler-dealer who conceals his amorality with charm, Pine delivers the most chilling portrait of youthful amorality since Ben Gazzara’s Jocko De Paris in THE STRANGE ONE (1957). --Robert Pardi
