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Street Talk’s radio show host Erica Bain (Jodie Foster)’s fiancee (Lost’s Naveen Andrews) is beaten down and killed as she is raped by punks in the park one night as they walk their puppy. Elsewhere, Sean Mercer (Terrence Howard) has fought crime as a New York detective with great struggle and little success, now battling a suicide that he knows is really a domestic homicide. When Bain wakes from a three-week coma, she discovers the same frustration plus the added pain of being a victim herself. What results is a desire to find justice with her own hands against the people who committed these acts, while she wrestles with her own fear, and the fear of others.

Justice is certainly an issue here. It’s found or missing in the pleading of Sean to his ex-wife to aid the domestic homicide victim’s daughter—when she refuses. It’s in a convenience store, where Erica stumbles on her powers of vengeance in the shooting death of the cashier, as she defends herself against the killer. The self-protecting experience leaves her shaken, but bolder: “It’s astonishing, even numbing to find that there is a stranger inside you, who has your arms, and your legs… a sleepless, restless stranger who walks inside you, and keeps eating, breathing, waiting.” That experience also pushes her away from her job, as she wants to “keep living, and not disappear”—but others aren’t prepared to deal with her pain.

This is a vigilante movie. Foster could be The Punisher, or maybe Batman, but she has more of an internal struggle when she takes justice into her own hands. “I should’ve gotten off that train; I could’ve just shown them the gun. They wouldn’t have hurt me,” she voiceovers after one gun-blazing outing. You have to wonder if that’s true. But the more telling question is, “Why don’t my hands shake?” Is that capability in every wounded soul, to fight back and shoot first, and ask questions later? Is this a comic book character, freed from a colorful costume, sketched onto the silver screen—or is this a real-life figure we might know personally, or even become?

(It’s also an interesting side note that upon arriving at home from her coma, Erica’s first action is to don her cross necklace, which she religiously strokes. It’s later given up in a moving turning point, where she urges one of those she aided to tell the truth. How does the cross fit into that? I’d say, but I’d spoil the whole thing…)

In a shocking twist, while Erica cleans up the streets with her gun, her radio shows are attracting the attention of a hurting city, and her passion and character attract the attention of Sean. It’s the irony of their interaction as Sean searches for the vigilante but doesn’t know that she’s right in front of him. “Everybody talks, and almost everybody lies, but the dead can’t [lie.]” That’s what makes the dead interesting to him; but their common pursuits mete out life and death, while trying to transcend death but remaining locked in it. The only question I had early on was this: when would Sean apply the one rule of television profiler shows, and recognize that the person who interjects themselves fully into the case is usually the prime suspect?

The movie takes an interesting twist when the radio show becomes the platform for people sharing their feelings about the vigilante. “Revenge makes us feel good, I mean that’s why we have war,” yells one caller, before another questions if we haven’t learned from Iraq or how dangerous killing in our own interest can be. Erica’s own guilt begins eating away at her, and the effect is dramatic, even as her neighbor tells her that when someone kills, each time “it leaves a hole.”

The good detective closes in on the vigilante who has both charmed his heart and handed out justice that he couldn’t find within the law—and thwarted the police so far. It becomes clear that Erica’s life no longer matters to her: she lives only for vengeance, and without it, she doesn’t really live. I might argue she doesn’t really live even with it—and the movie continues long after she has, in effect, died. What resurrection occurs happens out of sacrifice, but it doesn’t necessarily resolve everything. How can you go back from that? How can you change?

The only change I know occurs through real love, through the life of Christ, and this doesn’t present itself that way. Still, in the end, “good” does triumph, and a life is gained. I’m still not sure that’s the bravest option that Erica explored—it’s the one that fills the hole of her fiancee’s death, but in the end, it just creates a greater longing, a longing only love can fill.