What was the fuss about?

On paper, Monster's Ball is an old-fashioned, liberal melodrama, overloaded with tragic events and earnest sentiments. Just the sort of high-minded message movie to attract those Academy voters who chose Halle Berry as Best Actress at Sunday's Oscars, making her the first African-American woman to win this accolade. Berry herself has tended to choose roles mindful of their broader social implications. In her passionate acceptance speech, she called this recognition for her performance as an unglamorous waitress a triumph for "the nameless, faceless women of colour who now stand a chance".

On screen, this - the third feature by the German-born, Swiss-educated director Marc Forster - turns out to be something different, and rather more interesting. As British viewers can judge when the film opens here in June, it's by no means a token winner.

Billy Bob Thornton plays Hank, a prison officer working on death row in a Georgia penitentiary. Hank's life is a vale of tears. Both his mother and his wife have taken their own lives. Now he shares a joyless house with his redneck father, Buck, and son, Sonny. The terminally ill Buck (Peter Boyle) rules the family from his wheelchair with a rod of iron. Sonny (a startling and bold choice of role for emergent heart-throb Heath Ledger) is weak and vacillating. It's a male dynasty of hatred, with racism and misogyny passed on, from father to son, down the generations.

Hank's life changes dramatically after he presides over the execution of a black prisoner (Monster's Ball refers to a condemned man's last night on earth). The execution leads indirectly to a terrible suicide, which causes Hank to quit his job. Soon afterwards, he meets Leticia, the prisoner's widow (Berry). A neurotic mess and a bad mother to her seriously overweight, small son, she scarcely seems a catch. But Hank, in his own emotional need, is attracted to her.

An inter-racial romance, then, and a steamy one: the explicit sex scenes between Berry and Thornton were partly trimmed for the American release version in order to avoid an adult-only rating for Monster's Ball. The film doesn't waste time squeezing dramatic mileage out of the idea that the condemned man is the innocent victim of a bigoted justice system ("I'm a bad man," he acknowledges), but it evolves in unexpected ways.

In some ways, race is incidental to the love story. It is, instead, about overcoming prejudice and the burden of the past - and also about whether a relationship begun in order to drown private pain can ever be entirely healthy.

At first, neither Hank nor Leticia is aware of their macabre connection. The audience's anxiety about what will happen when they find out was palpable from my seat at the screening. Yet, when they do discover the truth at different moments, neither reacts as anticipated. There are no scenes of revelation, confrontation or recrimination. Like its own characters, this is a quiet, laconic film, not given to sensationalism. And the final scene is delicate enough to leave a disquieting ambiguity.