Rooting for the Devil: How Contemporary Cinema Engineers Our Moral Blind Spots

There is a particular discomfort that settles in somewhere around the drive home from the theater. You replayed the film in your mind, defended a choice the protagonist made, felt the sting of their setback—and then, in the quiet of the car, you asked yourself: why exactly was I cheering for that person?

This is not an accident. It is, increasingly, the point.

Contemporary cinema has refined the art of moral misdirection to such a degree that the gap between what a character does and what an audience feels has become one of the most fertile creative territories in modern filmmaking. Directors are no longer satisfied with protagonists audiences merely follow. They want protagonists audiences protect—even when those protagonists deserve no such loyalty.

The Architecture of Unearned Sympathy

Empathy in film is not a natural response to goodness. It is a manufactured response to proximity, specificity, and narrative framing. The moment a camera lingers on a character's face before they commit a transgression, it is already building a case for the defense.

The Safdie Brothers understood this instinctively. Uncut Gems (2019) places Adam Sandler's Howard Ratner at the center of a relentless anxiety spiral, and the film's genius lies in how it recruits the audience into Howard's compulsive logic. He is a gambling addict who steals, manipulates, and endangers everyone around him. He is also, somehow, the person most viewers spend 135 minutes desperately hoping will win. The Safdies accomplish this not by softening Howard's flaws but by making the audience experience time the way Howard does—accelerated, claustrophobic, always one bad decision from collapse. Shared rhythm becomes shared allegiance.

This is the architecture of unearned sympathy: deny the audience distance, and they will fill the void with identification.

Denis Villeneuve and the Ethics of Perspective

Where the Safdies operate through visceral immersion, Denis Villeneuve tends to engineer moral complicity through perspective control. Sicario (2015) is perhaps his most precise study in this technique. Emily Blunt's Kate Macer functions as the audience surrogate—an FBI agent with genuine ethical convictions operating inside a system that has quietly abandoned them. Yet the film's real protagonist, in terms of dramatic weight and narrative momentum, is Josh Brolin's Matt Graver, a man whose methods and motives remain deliberately opaque.

By the time Benicio del Toro's Alejandro commits acts of unambiguous violence, Villeneuve has so thoroughly established the operational logic of the world these men inhabit that a significant portion of the audience has already conceded the moral argument. We have been led, frame by frame, to accept premises we would reject if stated plainly at the outset.

This is not manipulation in the pejorative sense. It is filmmaking operating at its most sophisticated—using the grammar of cinema to replicate the gradual erosion of principle that occurs in real institutions and real lives.

The Television Training Ground

It would be incomplete to discuss this phenomenon without acknowledging the decade-plus of prestige television that preceded and shaped it. Walter White, Tony Soprano, and Don Draper spent years conditioning American audiences to extend extraordinary patience to extraordinary moral failures. By the time these viewing habits migrated back to theatrical cinema, audiences arrived pre-trained—already practiced in the art of compartmentalizing what a character is from what a character feels like.

Filmmakers recognized this shift and adapted accordingly. The morally gray protagonist is no longer a subversive choice. In certain genres, it has become the default.

When the Technique Outpaces the Intention

The more troubling question is what happens when the engineering works better than the filmmaker intended—or worse, when it works without adequate critical scaffolding.

Paul Verhoeven built Elle (2016) around a protagonist whose responses to trauma are deliberately designed to unsettle conventional sympathy. Isabelle Huppert's Michèle is not meant to be admired uncritically; the film expects its audience to hold multiple, conflicting responses simultaneously. That discomfort is the text. But not every film that places a morally compromised figure at its center has thought as carefully about what it is asking the audience to do with the feelings it generates.

When a crime film glamorizes its subject without the counterweight of consequence, when a character's charisma is allowed to function as moral exoneration, the technique stops being craft and starts being something closer to propaganda—not political propaganda, but emotional propaganda that quietly argues charm is a sufficient substitute for accountability.

The Audience as Moral Participant

What makes this conversation genuinely interesting from a cinematic standpoint is the degree to which it repositions the audience as an active moral participant rather than a passive consumer. A film that makes you root for the wrong character has, in a meaningful sense, asked you to examine what "wrong" means to you and how quickly your principles yield under the pressure of a well-constructed narrative.

This is not an indictment of the films that accomplish this—or of the audiences who respond to them. It is, rather, an acknowledgment of what cinema can do that few other art forms can replicate: create a controlled environment in which our moral intuitions are tested, revealed, and occasionally exposed as more negotiable than we believed.

The Safdie Brothers did not make Howard Ratner sympathetic to excuse his behavior. They made him sympathetic to show you how sympathy actually works—how it attaches itself to familiarity and rhythm and shared desperation rather than to virtue.

What This Tells Us About the Frame

Every editorial choice a director makes is an argument. The choice of whose face to cut to after a violent act, whose interiority to render visible, whose goals to align the narrative with—these are not neutral decisions. They are the mechanisms through which film shapes not just what we see but how we feel about what we see.

Contemporary cinema's growing sophistication in this area is, on balance, a sign of the medium's maturation. The most interesting films being made today are not interested in telling audiences what to think. They are interested in catching audiences in the act of thinking—and revealing, in that moment of capture, something true about how moral judgment actually functions under the pressure of a story well told.

The sympathy was never really about the character. It was always about you.