The last hope he was left with was the film about his father’s killer. Ritchie sensed that there was a cryptic accountancy of darkness, that the public was prepared to tolerate a certain amount of balancing and rounding up between different columns where sin and suffering were concerned. A distinguished film director, for example, might be able to take figures from the 'suffering' column – parents taken to Auschwitz, wife murdered – and transfer them over to the 'sin' column – committed statutory rape of a thirteen-year-old girl. This was acceptable, because, in some mysterious way, the figures all seemed to represent the same general quality of darkness, a more palatable and universal medium than wickedness, stoicism, evil or self restraint. In sum, there was no darkness received and darkness expended: there was only darkness.