In the Cold Dark Night
**Seen for the 2020 Atlanta Film Festival.
Martin Luther King Jr. once said (although he was not the first person to say it), “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” That is certainly the case in “In the Cold Dark Night,” wherein the 35-year-old murder of Timothy Coggins in Griffin, Georgia, is finally resolved, with the two perpetrators finding themselves guilty of committing the crime after a longer time than the 23-year-old Coggins was alive. Delayed justice is better than no justice, but wounds continue to open. Maybe in time, they will close.
Near the end of the film, the daughter of Frank Gebhardt, one of the men whom the Spalding County Sheriff’s Department and Georgia Bureau of Investigations has identified as one of Timothy’s murderers, is standing outside the courtroom after the guilty verdict comes down on the second man accused of Coggins’s murder. Also there are members of the Coggins family, but instead of a shouting match and anger, there is understanding and empathy. The Coggins family knows what it is like to lose a loved one, and they comfort the daughter, who has only known her father to be a kind and loving person. The moral universe is, indeed, bending towards justice, but also, to a point where forgiveness is necessary to lead us there. It’d be understandable for either side of the moment to meet the other with anger, but that’s not what happens, and it is one of the most potent moments in the film.
Co-director Stephen Robert Morse described the film to me in an interview as less of a whodunit but a “why did it happen?” There are signs we see throughout the film pointing in the direction of the two people whom are eventually convicted of the murder, but the why is both clear as day, and not so certain. The brutality on Timothy’s body screams hate crime, and racially-motivated, in 1983 Georgia, less than two decades after the end of the Civil Rights movement, but the nitty gritty motivation is not as certain. Was it because Coggins was a pot dealer? Or- more likely- was it because he was dating a white woman, still very much a taboo to a lot of Southern whites at that time, especially in Southern Georgia. More than those why’s, though, why did so many people, who allegedly knew something about the murder, stay silent? That’s one of the more fundamental questions the film has on its mind, and something that, again, points to the old prejudices that resulted in Coggins’s murder in the first place.
The film’s “main character,” so to speak, is Spalding County Sheriff Darrell Dix, whom wants to be an example for change in his community, and not a relic of the old days. A born-again Christian, he takes his charge as Sheriff seriously, and wants to bridge the divide between law enforcement and the African-American community that has not been given a reason to trust them. As we see him go about the business of bringing this case to a conclusion after 35 years, you feel hope that he might be able to. Once again, the moral universe, at least in this community, seems to be bending towards justice. Hopefully, the rest of our country will follow suit sooner rather than later.
