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Halle Berry is my favorite Oscar-winning actress to star in a movie produced by World Wrestling Entertainment.

With an impressive career marred by critical and box office bombs after being the first African-American to win a Best Actress Oscar statue, Berry doesn’t look like she is doing much to help herself with the paint-by-numbers WWE-backed thriller hitting theaters this weekend, The Call. In honor of the film, I decided to look back at the highlight of Berry’s career – Monster’s Ball.

Don’t get me wrong. I like Berry. She starred in Cloud Atlas, one of my favorite films of last year, turned in solid performances in the underrated Gothika and Things We Lost in the Fire, and played one of the hottest Bond girls in Die Another Day. Yet everything between those projects has been lacking (*ahem* Catwoman, Perfect Stranger, New Year’s Eve, Dark Tide *ahem*).

I have never seen Berry’s Oscar-winning turn in Monster’s Ball before, so as I started to stream the film, I did not know what to expect. At first very off-putting, Monster’s Ball has a strange way of making your skin crawl before digging its way underneath it.

The film is over brimming with tragedies to the point where it becomes a bit eye rolling. A racist father. A soon-to-be-executed father. An obese son. An evicted mother. A death of a child. A loveless father-son relationship. A son’s suicide. A hit-and-run. And all of this is even before the halfway point.

Billy Bob Thorton stars as Hank Grotowkski, a corrections officer along with his son, Sonny (Heath Ledger), at a local prison. Living under the same roof with Hank’s racist widowed grandfather (Peter Boyle), the hardened and hate-filled household is shaken up once Sonny commits suicide.

In another crumbling family situation, Leticia (Halle Berry) faces eviction from her house as she struggles to raise her obese son she abuses after her husband is sent to the electric chair.

Picking up another job at a local diner, Leticia meets Hank and the two start a sex-driven affair.

Monster’s Ball chronicles the two lonely leads who have little likability as they start a relationship (Hank tries to withhold his participation in Leticia’s husband execution) while their fortunes continue to worsen.

Dark and dreary and fairly hopeless, Monster’s Ball made me want to turn off the TV about 30 minutes in. I do not mind films with dark overtones, but I do not care for movies that are exercises in one-upping tragedy for a tear-stained ending. However, about halfway through when Hank and Leticia start their romance, the film starts to spark.

Produced by Precious helmer Lee Daniels and directed by Marc Forster (Quantum of Solace, Stranger than Fiction), the southern-set drama is disturbingly intimate. There is no wall dividing the viewer from the characters on screen. This is most apparent in the much-talked about Berry-Thorton alcohol and sadness fueled sex scene that throws the rule of less being more right out the window.

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