The Pledge

The Pledge (2001) is Sean Penn's crime thriller you can watch online on iFILM. Detective Jerry Black, played by Jack Nicholson, retires on his last day of work and immediately takes on a case that will never let him go.

The body of a murdered eight-year-old girl is found in the snowy mountains. Black's flight to Mexico and his fishing plans evaporate as he volunteers to break the news to the parents. The mother makes him swear on a cross that he will find the killer, and that promise turns into an obsession. He buys a roadside gas station in the dead-end country, grows close to a local waitress, Lori (Robin Wright), and her young daughter, and slowly loses the line between investigation and fixation. The cast also features Benicio del Toro, Aaron Eckhart, Helen Mirren, Mickey Rourke and Sam Shepard.

The screenplay is adapted from Friedrich Dürrenmatt's novella. Penn skips the tidy detective formula for a slow, bleak portrait of a man bound by his own word. The ending refuses to give the audience the closure it expects. Stream The Pledge (2001) online on iFILM.