The Phantom movie review & film summary (2021)

His alibi was “clearly a lie.” It wasn’t until the trial was underway that he revealed the name of the man he said committed the murder: Carlos Hernandez. In that part of Texas, he might as well say John Smith. But the police looked into all of the Carlos Hernandezes who had been arrested in the area in the past ten years. None of them did it. The prosecutor called DeLuna a “predator,” warning the jury, “He will harm again.” Determinations of guilt are based on reasonable doubt, not absolute certainty. Finding DeLuna guilty seems reasonable. 

However, there were already indications that there was more than a reasonable doubt. Lopez was stabbed to death with a knife and photos of the scene show a lot of blood. But DeLuna had no blood on his clothes or shoes. While DeLuna had been in trouble before, stabbing a woman to death “was not his manner of committing crimes.” One commenter says, “the only evidence is eyewitness evidence, and that’s the worst evidence in the world.”  

Some of the people from the community say that in cases where the victim and/or the accused are Latinx, the system does not try as hard to find the truth. And, as the reporter who followed the case on one of her first assignments says, “there’s not always two sides to a story; sometimes there are three, four, or five.” 

The first part of “The Phantom” could almost be a summation to the jury by the prosecution. But then we get the other sides to the story, and the story as presented to us so far begins to unravel. Those eye-witnesses? “It was dark and they had a guy in the car,” one of them says now. The man they saw wore a white shirt. The man in the car was shirtless. “I probably should have asked, ‘Where is his shirt?'” Sometimes we see what we want to see, especially when it comes to our need to find a resolution that feels comfortable and, well, resolved. Culprit behind bars; all is well.