'The Good Mother' review: Drug addiction tale hits dead end

There's a moment midway through "The Good Mother" when a grieving mom, still reeling from the death of her estranged junkie son, pulls up to a safe injection site and learns about drug addiction from the outside in.

It's a crucial turning point for the movie. Her eyes are opened to the reality of what her son was and what so many others are going through, and as a journalist, she has a natural empathy for others and their plight. As she walks through the site the movie looks like it's headed down one path, where she puts her storytelling skills to use and sheds light on the world that took her son, in a kind of painful but healing tribute to his memory.

Instead, she spots a figure the story has been circling around up to this point and chases him into the night, abandoning what could be an interesting story thread and leading "The Good Mother" toward its traditional, conventional thriller-style conclusion. It's a wrong turn in a movie with several of them.

Double Oscar-winner Hilary Swank stars as Marissa Bennings, a widow and mother in Albany, New York, whose son is gunned down over a bag of fentanyl-laced heroin. His girlfriend, Paige (Olivia Cooke), is pregnant with their child; Marissa's other son, Toby (Jack Reynor), is a cop investigating the murder.

For awhile, co-writer and director Miles Joris-Peyrafitte looks at Marissa's world and investigates her grieving; she takes a leave of absence from her newspaper job, where she's ambivalent toward the clickbait-driven direction of the business, and drowns her sorrows at local bars. She's devastated, and Swank's outer detachment is illustrative of the pain Marissa is feeling inside.

But then "The Good Mother" takes a few unconvincing turns as it settles into routine thriller territory, more suited to a weekly television series than a feature film. And the finer character-driven aspects of the storytelling are tossed aside, just like the logic of a movie taking place in 2016 where characters are still clinging to their flip-phones. "The Good Mother" is a well-intentioned but clumsily executed misfire.

agraham@detroitnews.com

'The Good Mother'

GRADE: C-

Rated R: for language throughout, some violent content and drug material

Running time: 90 minutes

In theaters