I don’t get this one at all. The two most important characters are entirely off-screen; we never get to observe them, even in flashback. We learn nothing concrete and specific about either one, except that one is supposedly very bad, and the other very good. Yet everything in the movie hinges on those vaguenesses! At the conclusion, we are asked to accept a morally questionable resolution without having been given the slightest solid reason for doing so.

Now, I can think of crime novels with morally questionable resolutions - Ross Macdonald’s The Drowning Pool and Robert B. Parker’s Ceremony come to mind - but in those cases, the build-up and the reasoning are clear; you can buy in or not, you can think about it. But Cover Up gives you nothing firm enough to think about.

The sad thing is, the theme here is an interesting one - a small town bully whose murder is covered up by the entire town. It brings to mind the famous case of the murder of Ken McElroy in Skidmore, Missouri, in 1981, which was buttoned up and never has been unbuttoned. (There is an entire book about this, In Broad Daylight by Harry N. MacLean.) But such a scenario invites a dark, disturbing treatment, not the warm folksy holiday movie that Cover Up aspires to be.