Here, Thornton plays Hank Grotowski, a senior corrections officer at a prison ostensibly placed in Georgia. Hank supervises a team of officers, which includes his son Sonny (Heath Ledger), and which is assigned to carry out the electric chair execution of a black convict. (Incidentally, a "monster's ball" is defined as the party thrown for a prison guard before he attends at his first execution.) Living with Hank at home is his aging, physically debilitated and venomously racist father, Buck (Peter Boyle), formerly a prison guard also.

The wife of the man to be executed is Leticia, played by Halle Berry. She's gamely trying to pay the rent and keep the car running by working as a waitress, and is raising an overweight son whom she sharply disciplines in an attempt to get him to stop eating everything in sight. (Leticia is convinced that fat, black men don't have a chance in America.)

Both Hank and Leticia are leading separate lives of quiet - and sometimes not so quiet - desperation, each being psychologically and emotionally dragged under by circumstances and taxing personal relationships. Then, in a series of traumatic events over a short period of time, each is cut free of burdens and left, through serendipitous accident, with only each other.

MONSTER'S BALL contains several volatile scenes of emotions on the rawest of edges, and which will keep the viewer riveted. Thornton and Berry both give exemplary performances as two people in unlikely company coming to grip with personal demons. As fair warning to the sensitive, the film incorporates episodes of intense sexuality.