MS. KNIGHT PLOTHOLE SPOILER!!!!

I agree. That part was the worst part of the script. You'd think revenge would be second on her list...finding her son would be first.

Also, when she goes to that little shack Jimmy lives in and hears the woman shuffling around, she calls out her son's name. First of all, how would she know that's where he lives, and not in the house? And second of all, after shooting the one person who could tell her where her son is, she goes on to kill a woman who she has never seen before. Makes no sense at all. Except that everything she's gone through has possibly driven her insane. It's just that it is so weakly developed.

However, as much as the plot of this film disappoints, the acting is pretty good. Ryan Phillippe as Jimmy is excellent.


"I'd never ask you to trust me. It's the cry of a guilty soul."

Caught the end of this movie for the first time last night and was amazed at how uncomfortable it made me in very little time.

Not a plot hole.

This woman is long past being at all willing to negotiate in any manner with these depraved criminals.

She’s mentally disturbed for being the long-suffering victim of two crimes — her husband’s murder and her child’s kidnapping. She’s searched for years to find her child but it’s been a long and fruitless effort until now. Law enforcement has been feckless and dismissive; then a private detective, also unsuccessful, goes missing in Texas. At this point she’s become resolved to take the matter fully into her own hands and deliver her own brand of justice to the man who ‘ruined my life.’

To have him answer for the long search and unhappy years without her family, as part of her revenge she amuses herself by forcing the kidnapper to recognize that he wasn’t as in the clear as he may have thought by requiring him to say ‘It ain’t over till the fat lady sings.”

She then continues to search for her long lost child and believes she’s found him when she hears sniffles from someone cowering under a blanket.

She instead finds Kinski and immediately understands why this woman (the kidnapper’s wife) is cowering. That she’s guilty of in some way being party to the kidnapping. In this case by default as she has been aware from the start that her husband brought home a kidnapped child or, even if that wasn’t the case, that for whatever reasons she never reported the sudden appearance of this unknown child to police. Instead, going along with the program by allowing herself to be manipulated to use the child to fulfill her need for affection and sexual appetite.

Hence, just before shooting Kinski, the mother requires her to say “Silence isn’t always golden.”



“Your thinking is untidy, like most so-called thinking today.” (Murder, My Sweet)

I agree. That is why I think that it is still possible that Kate is Jimmy's biological mother, although it is clear that the Knights played some kind of a role in the past and were raising the child for some reason. Doris Knight's complete lack of interest in finding her son suggests that there must be something more to the backstory than what we are told on the surface.

When Doris Knight finds Kate--and briefly thinks it could be Jimmy--it is almost as though finding Jimmy is a minor afterthought for her. That makes no sense to me.

By contrast, Kate shows maternal support for Jimmy in every scene except, perhaps, the one where she and Jimmy are forced to have intercourse.