Great comment. Woven by nuance with concern for shifting personal perspective and touching on the general problem of grappling with self and identity by example. I saw Burkhart as Adolph Eichmann. [(Britanica: organized the identification, assembly, and transportation of Jews from all over occupied Europe to their final destinations at Auschwitz and other extermination camps in German-occupied Poland.) At his Jerusalem trial Hannah Arendt assessed his actions as “the banality of evil.”] Burkhardt is a mundane expression of evil in domestic life when he poisons his wife on a daily basis with spiked insulin. But not full Eichmann. On another side, Burkhart loves Mollie. He says and does several things expressing this emotion that seem to be removed from Hale’s agenda. For me, it was incredible when he tells Hale in his jail cell to stay away from his family. He’s so far into his evil commitment when he sees the light. His reply to Mollie asking him what was in the syringes was the emotional core of the film for me. The pinnacle statement. Guilt, knowledge, ignorance, anger, desired repentance, greed, regret, fear—in one word—insulin. He’s lying. But how culpable is his knowledge of what he did to Mollie? It’s ambiguous. If he’s tracking the destruction that was happening in Fairfax as closely as he was involved in it, then it would be understandable that he knew while there maybe insulin in the syringes there was also poison. But what did he think of his uncle in those intimate conversations they had before going to jail?