This is a taut, brilliant courtroom drama that unfolds almost entirely in a single space: a jury room, on a stifling summer’s day in New York City. Twelve white men are deliberating a murder case involving a teenage boy of an unnamed ethnicity, living in a New York slum, accused of killing his father. Eleven of them are convinced of his guilt from the outset. The case seems so open-and-shut that they want to reach a verdict quickly and get home in time for the baseball game.

Henry Fonda is the lone dissenter. He isn’t convinced the defence has done its job properly, and he insists on slowing things down – going through the evidence point by point. What’s remarkable is how much the film turns on small particulars: the angle of a switchblade, a witness’s eyesight, the sound of a train passing at just the wrong moment. These details aren’t flashy, but they matter, and the film insists that justice lives or dies in precisely this kind of scrutiny.

Although it began life as a television play, it feels wholly cinematic. Shot in widescreen, with expressive camera movement, it uses space, framing, and performance to generate extraordinary tension. The heat is almost palpable: sweat beads on foreheads, tempers flare, impatience creeps in. And what gradually becomes clear is that the greatest obstacle isn’t the evidence itself, but groupthink – the way prejudice, convenience, and fatigue try to bulldoze doubt.

Fonda barely raises his voice. His courage is quiet, procedural, almost mundane: asking people to look again, to re-examine a timeline, to test a certainty that has become comfortable. One by one, the jurors shift their votes – not because they’re suddenly convinced of innocence, but because reasonable doubt asserts itself. The film shows how easily statements can be shaped to fit a story, how quickly conclusions harden before the facts have really been examined, and how those who raise questions are often treated as the problem.

We never see the trial itself beyond the judge’s opening instructions. We don’t hear from the lawyers themselves. Everything is filtered through memory, interpretation, and argument, reminding us how fragile truth can be once it leaves the courtroom. Each juror emerges as a fully formed individual, carrying personal history, resentment, fear, and bias into the room.

At its heart, ‘12 Angry Men’ is a profound meditation on what a fair trial actually means – on the responsibility to pause, to ventilate a closed room, to open a window and let clarity back in. And the final moment, when Fonda quietly puts on the jacket of his great antagonist, played by Lee J. Cobb, is so humane and understated that it still feels devastating. It’s the sound of a verdict changing – not with a bang, but with care.