Richard Dutcher's Brigham City is a somewhat religious whodunit about more than what's on the surface. In a sleepy Mormon town called Brigham City, the local sheriff (Dutcher) and his deputy (Brown) come upon a car with a California license plate and a dead woman in a nearby shed. They try to protect the rest of the community by handing it over to the FBI, but no one can ignore it when the local townspeople start getting murdered.
To call it a sleepy town is an understatement. It feels stoic and muted and boring, and all of the characters within the town are just as stoic and muted and boring. For the first half hour or so, this slowness makes the whole movie unappealing in a cheesy 1990's style. But it works surprisingly well at building tension during the rest of the movie. And even thought it's predictable (you almost always know when the movie is trying to throw you off track), it still works. It works because you never really know who the killer is until the end. You may have guessed that person while running through all the potential suspects in your head, but I doubt you would have been confident enough to settle on that person before it was revealed.
The cinematic qualities in this film are subpar (the low-cost film Mystery Team had better acting, writing, and filmmaking), but that's not the movie's strong suit. The great part about this movie is that you think about it after you finish it. You wonder about all the unspoken workings of the movie, both an impeccably well thought out reflection and homage to the silence of God. This movie is very openly Mormon, in a lot of aspects, but there are also a lot of subtle religious overtones and comments that make it far more intriguing than one might think after an initial viewing without giving it some extra thought. The choice of killer is extremely interesting, and the unsaid motivations and truths paint an even more fascinating picture when you look beyond the film. The story is much stronger than its component parts (from dialogue to characters to acting), but the story is a compelling one. Watch it if you like a good mystery movie, or if you've entertained conversations on God's presence or absence in our lives. It will get you talking about it again.IMDb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0268200/