In the heartbreaking lesbian love story My Days of Mercy at TIFF, Ellen Page holds an unbearable amount of stress on her shoulders. The daughter of a man on death row, she innocently falls in love with a woman (Kate Mara) on the opposite side of her family’s passionate political cause.
Sisters Lucy (Page) and Martha Morrow (Kate Mara) are regular attendees at state executions across America’s Midwest. They drive hours on end to demonstrate in favour of abolishing the death penalty. Their passion has a purpose, as we learn their father is on death row and has just 4 months until his execution date. The story is all the more horrifying as we learn the father was charged with killing his own wife leaving the couples three children to raise themselves. They nobly spend years turning their backs on pursuing an education to fight for their fathers life.
In most stories set up like this, Lucy and Martha would be bitter enemies, yet their relationship grows from hostility to curiosity, transforming into intense physical passion. The divisiveness around the politics of the death penalty offers a brilliant backdrop for director Tali Shalom-Ezer to showcase one woman’s hurricane of anxiety as she fights two battles two storms in tandem: desperate to believe her father is innocent from a heinous crime while battling sexual demons in her closet.
