Clemency

Bernadine Williams is the warden of a maximum security prison, responsible for overseeing executions on death row. As she prepares for another one, a botched procedure and the case of a condemned man begin to press on her, while her marriage and her sleep steadily give way.

The film is a close study of numbing and dissociation, showing how the repetition of doing a terrible thing accumulates as moral injury and hollows a person from within. It belongs in a therapist's library for its unflinching portrait of professional trauma and psychic erosion. It won the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Dramatic film at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival.