Based on a true story. There aren’t many public details for the actual crime, because the girls were underage when it happened. Their true identities are not known, and they have both since been released from prison.
It’s interesting for a true-crime story. Some brief research online turns up a cursory wiki article, which is remarkably clinical. The technical details are there. The rest of this story is a mystery to me. How much of the background for the mother is accurate? How accurate is the behavior that the girls exhibit?
Their decision to kill their mother seems very levelheaded, which is interesting for this movie. Usually there would be a balance struck between making the girls sympathetic and suggesting a malevolence. In this movie, I never picked up on any real hints that the girls were evil. If anything, they seemed pragmatic. They didn’t hate their mother, and it didn’t come across as a crime of passion. It came across as a logical way to improve their lives, the life of their younger brother, as well as increase the odds of surviving to adulthood, and probably avoiding molestation. The mother shows no redeeming qualities (well, she isn’t outright bad, but she’s not doing anything good either).
The breakdown of both of the girls afterward is pretty well handled. They both react differently, and it’s hard to tell how much of it is a personality distinction, and how much is just a matter of who actually killed the mother.
For what it is, it’s actually a very good true-crime movie. And it makes me feel like the Canadian justice system is probably more reasonably balanced than the US one.
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