But still, there is the sense that things aren't quite that simple. Throughout the film, we see the torture that a hidden sin wreaks upon it perpetrator, and it is difficult to think that struggle will just suddenly disappear. From beginning to end, we see the very way that lies trap those they surround. And even though some of the truth is brought to the surface by the end, it is difficult to believe that the lies that remain will remain silent forever. As detective Grinko says, "With lies you many go ahead in the world, but you may never go back." And as two of the movie's characters are asked to sign statements of their honesty, the hesitation we see on one of the character's faces tells us that they know it too.

As much as the film may seem to be a portrait of gray, the truth is that in its gray are still black and white. As much as we may wish they were, justification and excuses just aren't enough to turn black to gray. But in what is a fairly bleak story, the movie also offers us a message of hope.

While we may not be able to turn wrong to right, we need not let wrong push us onto the "bad guy" side of the track for all eternity. As Roy tells Jessie at one point, "No matter what you say to me right now, I will still love you." They are the words of a loving husband, but they are also the foundation of the Christian faith which Roy follows. And in those words is the simple truth of freedom that the movie's characters spend much of the movie trying to find. In the world as God created it, there is wrong and there is right, but even when we choose to do wrong, even when the darkness forces us so far into the corner that we feel we have no other choice but to join it, He promises that he will still love us. And because he will always love us, He even gave his own life to pay the price for our wrongs, to free us from their spiritual imprisonment, and to return us to the light in which we were meant to live.

Reflecting on the fall of communism, Detective Grinko states, "Then we were a people living in the darkness, now we are a people dying in the light." His viewpoint being one that presumes both the necessity of evil and the need to keep it hidden to live.

But as the writer says in the first chapter of 1 John, freedom will never be found by hiding amidst the darkness of evil. In the light, the only death we face is the death of the evil that imprisons us. And in the end, it is only in the light that we will ever fully live

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