The ham-fisted exposition is what first struck me. Upon meeting Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber), the soon-to-be-editor of The Boston Globe, Walter Robbinson (Michael Keaton) asks him “Do you know what we do at Spotlight?” to which Marty, of course, replies “No”. Walter then proceeds to detail to the audience, and Marty if he’s still paying attention, an exact approximation of his team’s place at The Globe. I would have thanked him for his 5-second summary had I not been groaning over it. There are even points when you get a sense the screenwriter knows what’s being done when Walter later asks Michael Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo) why Mike has to keep repeating everything he’s saying. When this meeting with Marty occurs early on, staged with them sitting together at a bar, you can get a pass on clunky exposition. It’s when the movie continues to stage scenes as characters sitting and talking and refusing to let things be shown much at all that I saw the movie’s central flaw.

Relying so heavily on characters merely talking severely cripples Spotlight from grounding its conflict and stakes. This isn’t to say that the movie would have benefitted from an embodied villain. Certainly not: the facelessness of anything approaching an “enemy” is one of the smarter choices. But the institutional conflict, or the stakes of pervasive proximity the church has to everyone’s children, is so rarely visually substantiated in any way. If the poison of a rotten institution has oozed into every crack of society, from police to lawyers to one of the Spotlight team’s very neighbourhood, why hasn’t it oozed inside the frame?