Spotlight Review - 8 Reasons Why It Deserves To Be An Oscar Favourite

7. A Key Topic From A Unique Perspective

One of the biggest pitfalls of making an "issue" movies (something that invariably winds up being lumped into the awards conversation) is leaning far too much on the emotion of an already heartbreaking topic and offering little else in terms of filmmaking. It's something that hurts a lot of prestige pictures, particularly those that deal with hot topics like war, racism and persecution; all too often films happily let the innate horrors just carry the emotions, adding little more themselves. Spotlight doesn't settle for that. In telling the emergent scandal of child abuse in the Catholic Church from the point of view of the reporters who uncovered it, the film explores not only those horrors, but looks at the process of revealing them under the blight of extreme pressure. The journalist angle makes up the background of the film and means that while this is still an "issue" movie, it can operate as a thriller at the same time. Another great recent film, Pablo Larraín's The Club, tackled the paedophille priest issue in a likewise unique angle (in this case from inside one of the rehabilitation houses), mining it for its own message and showing that how the subject is approached is as important as the subject itself.