Juror #2 Review: Nicholas Hoult Shines In Subdued, Effective Courtroom Drama

A man wrestles with guilt in Clint Eastwood’s sober, spare new film, Juror #2. Justin (Nicholas Hoult), a magazine writer and recovering alcoholic, is called for jury duty. He’s reluctant to accept the duty, citing his wife’s pregnancy. He’d need to be available to her. Nonetheless the judge assures him there won’t be added demands on his schedule. The court sessions would wrap within his usual work hours.

The case circles the homicide of Kendall Carter. Her boyfriend, James, is the primary suspect. Multiple eyewitnesses at a local bar, where she was last seen with him, report the two had a heated argument. It was a rainy night. She stormed off and nobody can say for sure whether he did follow her. Next morning, she was discovered dead in a ravine.

Incidentally, as a series of flashbacks reveals, Justin was also in the same bar that night. He is in knots because he’d hit something while returning on the highway off which her body was found. There’s little extraneousness on display. What’s compelling is how Eastwood paints the shifting moral tussle in Justin. Right from the start, he’s uneasy about someone else having to bear the consequence of his action. Yes, he is uncertain whether he actually bumped off a rambling deer on the highway or Kendall herself. So, he stretches the waiting time for the group of co-jurors before they pronounce a verdict.

The filmmaking is lean and angles especially into the human drama. Eastwood lays the cards neatly. Each of the jurors have their own set of considerations, most to do with home and family and getting back to their kids. The insistence on reaching a quick verdict stems from the urgency of having to deal with a bunch of matters back home. It’s a duty nobody really wants. Most would rather get it over with as soon as they can. Who cares if the expediency compromises the judgements? Everyone except a baulkingJustin is in a hurry to close the verdict and rush home. But he, who got a new lease of life thanks to his wife choosing to trust him after his intense alcoholism abated, wants the wrongfully accused James to have at least a shot at hope and positive belief.

Eastwood isn’t so much censorious about an individual here as he is about an entire system where public defenders are overworked and the recourse to justice is tainted at every step. In the hands of a lesser filmmaker, the district attorney’s character played by a steely Toni Collette determined to press all charges on James would be deeply questioned. She would have certainly been turned into a greedy, viper-like ambitious woman who views her victory with the case merely as necessary to a promised promotion.

Thankfully, Jonathan A. Abrams’s screenplay refuses to ascribe sheer, blanketed villainy to her. She is sincere about her beliefs but also grows to have doubts once her tunnel vision is jolted. Eastwood creates desperate, flawed individuals, each asking for just a little bit of empathy. They aren’t being intentionally callous. If they had more time on their hands, less things to attend to, the case might have received generous engagement.

Juror #2 is a sturdy indictment of institutionally enforced haste, a climate of carelessly affixing verdicts. What of the presumption of innocence? Every shred of evidence gathered by the prosecution, congruent eyewitness testimony summoned reeks of what one of the jurors sums up as confirmation bias. Eastwood slices through the façade of efficiency, as one man’s trembling moral compass threatens to rattle convenient structures of arrogating guilt. Tight and compelling without forceful drama, Juror #2 draws its churning, fractured conscience from Nicholas Hoult’s nervously watchful performance, rolling between complicit silence and impelled, self-damaging resistance.

Juror #2 is now streaming on Jio Cinema.