A boy runs. He runs through the streets of Belfast, chased by British soldiers, while the incendiary guitar of Jimi Hendrix screams "Voodoo Child." He isn't running for a cause; he is not a martyr-in-the-making, nor an IRA soldier. Gerry Conlon, in Daniel Day-Lewis's masterful and feverish incarnation, is running because he stole some lead from a roof. He is a petty thief, a wayward son, a small-time crook whose only ideology is escaping the oppressive boredom of a city torn apart by conflict. It is from this detail, this shard of anti-heroic realism, that Jim Sheridan builds the monumental architecture of "In the Name of the Father," a work that transcends political cinema to become a Greek tragedy, a prison drama, and, ultimately, an almost theological essay on the transmission of guilt and grace between father and son.

The film, based on Conlon's autobiography, Proved Innocent, grafts itself onto the tradition of investigative cinema that reached its acme in the 1970s with masters like Costa-Gavras (Z) or Francesco Rosi (The Mattei Affair). But Sheridan, Irish to the core, deviates from this trajectory. While in those films the machinery of truth moved to unmask a corrupt system, here the system is a blind, almost Kafkaesque leviathan. Like Josef K. in The Trial, Gerry Conlon and his friends (the "Guildford Four") are sucked into a bureaucratic and judicial nightmare whose internal logic is inaccessible and monstrous. They are not accused of a crime; they are accused of being the convenient answer to a crime, the necessary scapegoat to placate the thirst for vengeance of a nation wounded by IRA bombings. The interrogation, shot with an almost unbearable psychological violence, is not a search for the truth, but a fabrication of it—a rite of verbal extortion that renders innocence an irrelevant detail.

But it is when the prison doors close that the film reveals its deepest soul and sheds its skin as a political thriller. The prison, that cinematic space par excellence for human dispossession (from Bresson's A Man Escaped to Becker's Le Trou), here becomes an Elizabethan stage, a microcosm where the true drama unfolds. In the cell with Gerry there is not just one innocent man, but two: his father, Giuseppe (Pete Postlethwaite), absurdly implicated in the same conspiracy. It is here that the film makes its most brilliant leap. History, with a capital H, becomes the grainy backdrop for an intimate and universal story: the impossible, and then necessary, reconciliation between a father and a son.

Giuseppe Conlon is no hero. He is a gentle, ailing man whose strength lies in an unshakeable faith and a silent dignity, almost irksome to his rebellious son. Pete Postlethwaite, whom Steven Spielberg called "probably the best actor in the world" after working with him on Jurassic Park, delivers a performance of subterranean power, made of weary glances, whispered prayers, and a resilience that has no need to scream. He is the film's moral anchor, the rock against which Gerry's nihilistic rage breaks. Their relationship is a duel played out in a few square meters: the son's anarchic, postmodern rebellion against the father's ancient, almost biblical integrity. Sheridan films this dynamic with a moving proximity, transforming the cell into a confessional, a womb, a tomb. It is in this asphyxiating space that Gerry, stripped of everything, learns to see his father no longer as a symbol of weakness, but as the embodiment of a strength he never knew he possessed. The struggle for physical survival transforms into a battle for spiritual salvation.

Daniel Day-Lewis, as is his custom, does not play Gerry Conlon: he becomes him. His metamorphosis is staggering. He moves from the arrogant swagger of a young Belfast punk, to the hallucinatory desperation of the interrogation, to the impotent rage of the inmate, and finally to the icy, almost priestly determination of a man who has inherited a mission. His very body becomes a map of his inner journey: the initial swagger contracts into a bundle of nerves, only to later unwind into a posture of renewed dignity. It is a performance that lives on furious peaks and abyssal silences, a masterpiece of immersion that marks one of the high points of his career.

The film is also a meta-textual reflection on the power of word and image. The coerced confession is a false "story" that becomes legal truth. The campaign for their release, led by the tenacious lawyer Gareth Peirce (an Emma Thompson of adamantine intelligence), is the construction of a counter-narrative, a true "story" struggling to emerge. Cinema itself, with its ability to give body and voice to the forgotten, becomes the final act of this battle. The scene in which Gerry, finally free, exits the courthouse and addresses the crowd and the cameras is not just the closing of the narrative circle, but an artistic statement. He is speaking to the world, but above all he is speaking to us, the viewers, casting us in the role of final witnesses. "I'm going to fight for my father. In the name of the father." The line that gives the film its title takes on a powerfully polysemic meaning: it is in Giuseppe's name, but it is also an almost religious invocation, an appeal to a higher justice—human, before it is divine.

Jim Sheridan, along with co-screenwriter Terry George (who would go on to direct Hotel Rwanda, another descent into the abyss of human injustice), orchestrates this complex material with masterful balance. The soundtrack, which blends the rock energy of Hendrix and Bob Marley with the poignant melancholy of Trevor Jones's original score and songs by Bono and Gavin Friday, is not mere accompaniment but a veritable emotional and cultural commentary, the voice of a generation trapped between rebellion and tradition. Peter Biziou's cinematography shifts from the cold, desaturated tones of a Belfast under siege, to the psychedelic and illusory colors of a London commune, to the oppressive, almost monochromatic gray of the prison, visually mapping the characters' inner landscapes.

"In the Name of the Father" is not a film about the IRA, nor is it a pamphlet against the British judicial system. These are the elements of the drama, not its heart. Its incandescent core is the discovery that the real prison is not the one with bars, but the inability to recognize the value of those beside us. It is a film about fatherhood as an inheritance, not of blood or land, but of principles. Gerry Conlon enters prison as a boy fleeing his father and leaves it as a man who carries his name forward. Historical injustice, however brutal, becomes the paradoxical catalyst for an act of love and redemption. It is this shift, this ability to find the universal in the particular, to transform a chronicle of a miscarriage of justice into an epic of the soul, that elevates Sheridan's film from a great work of civic protest to a timeless masterpiece. A work that reminds us that, sometimes, to find our own voice, we must first learn to listen to the quiet but indestructible voice of a father.