Over the last weekend, I laid my hands on my room-mate’s DVD collection. Out of the 2 movies I find worth writing about, this is on the top of the list. The Life of David Gale is almost half a decade old movie. It is thrilling without any violence, shocking, disturbing, and definitely not a stereotype.

The movie is about Prof. David Gale, who teaches at University of Texas. He is a father to a son whom he looses in battle of custody, in an estranged relationship which ends in divorce , an excellent professor and orator, intelligent and an advocate against capital punishment. The movie starts backwards.

We meet Prof. Gale, convicted of rape and murder, in the prison giving away interview to a beautiful journalist. Four days is all he has to prove his innocence,when he begins narrating his story, else his heart would be stopped using Potassium Chloride. On one eventful night he ends up making out consensually with a woman. Next day he is arrested and convicted of raping her. They find his DNA on her, her finger scratchings around his body…it would be hard to convince that she was not raped. And then she leaves, drops the charges. But Gale’s career is devastated. His wife leaves for Scotland with his son and sells the house, he looses his job and no one wants to hire a rapist anymore-not even a coffee pub.

Disoriented and shattered Gale starts living in a hispanic neighbourhood, and then in a car. Drunk Gale teaches the crowd about Socrates. He is not able to talk to his son. Above all his best friend and supporter is diagonsed with leukamia. And then one day he is arrested for the murder of this woman – his best friend. You are shocked on how could a man so brilliant rape a woman and then murder his best friend ? The journalist starts hunting for the truth and all she has is 24 hours to preserve his memory for his son.

She does a great job and reveals the shock and awe. “Give me the name of one innocent man who was sentenced to death?”. This was the question the Governer asked Gale on a TV debate show, and Gale had no answer to it. But now he had.

Did the system fail or work ? It is for you to figure out.