redemption

An industrialist starts a list to keep his workers alive in Schindler's List and cannot make it long enough. The Shawshank Redemption gives a banker twenty years and a rock hammer. Rocky sends a club fighter into a title bout hoping only to still be standing at the end. You watch someone pay it back in instalments, in front of people who remember.

Two things are worth knowing before browsing it. The term also absorbs plain self-sacrifice, so films whose hero pays a final price for someone else land here even when nobody is atoning for anything — which is why The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King and Up are on the shelf. And it wants a debt: a character who simply improves is Coming of Age or Underdog Triumph, while this term needs someone who did damage, knows it, and spends the film paying. It's a Wonderful Life, The Seventh Seal and Groundhog Day bend the shape — the debt is owed to a life rather than to a victim — and are the more interesting entries for it.