SLIFF 2013: How We Got Away With It

2014 // USA // Jon Lindstrom // November 23, 2013 // Digital Theatrical Projection (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

[Full Disclosure: How We Got Away With It was one of five debut feature films in the juried New Filmmaker’s Forum competition at the 2013 St. Louis International Film Festival. I served on the NFF jury, and spoke with director Jon Lindstrom briefly at the SLIFF Closing Night Party. This review is intentionally biased to provide an affirmative, constructive evaluation of the film.]

Director Jon Lindstrom’s ambitious debut feature, How We Got Away With It, functions as a mystery on many levels. As it says right there in the title, the film concerns the process by which a group of unlikely individuals successfully commit and cover up a brutal crime. Yet the film is as concerned with the What and Why as it is with the How. For a hefty portion of the How's running time, the exact misdeed that is perpetrated remains murky, until it is abruptly revealed in a vicious, startling flashback. Most crucially, the motive for the crime is only explained in the final scenes, creating a nagging itch that scurries beneath the surface of the film, always just out of reach.

This somewhat elliptical approach to what is otherwise a straightforward tale of bloodshed and lies is both How’s most distinctive narrative feature and its most confounding flaw. The screenplay, co-written by Lindstrom and actors McCaleb Burnett and Jeff Barry, begins with a solid, even intriguing premise. A circle of thirtysomething friends are gathering for their annual hang-out at the sprawling seaside home of Henry (Burnett), an affable restaurateur. Before the festivities kick off, however, Henry arrives home to find a dead woman swinging from a rope in his dining room.

The questions begin accumulating immediately: Who is the deceased? Why did she end her life? Why does Henry not call the police, but instead hastily cut down and conceal the body before his friends arrive? That How feels no particular need to rush answers for these or any other queries is indicative of the film’s approach to story development. It favors a light, quasi-naturalistic touch that can occasionally be frustrating in its obfuscations. As the guests begin to appear, the lay of the land only get more convoluted. It takes some time to sort out who everyone is, what their relationships to one another are, and whether any particular individual is involved in Henry’s plans. As it turns out, the host has a dark scheme in mind for the weekend, a plot whose urgency only seems to have been heightened by the suicide cover-up.

Henry is mellow and gregarious with his friends, but privately wary and cold-blooded. In short order, he reveals his designs to his vaguely loutish but devoted friend Will (Barry) and unintentionally pulls in the group’s token burnout, Ronnie (Jacob Knoll). Both men reluctantly agree to assist Henry with his plan, which entails a sinister fate for a man named Walter (Richard Bekins). An older, middle-aged drunk employed at Henry’s restaurant, Walter is plainly loathed by the man and his friends, but as with many elements of How’s story, the reasons are initially obscured.

Meanwhile, numerous other story threads are woven into the film’s fabric, not all of them especially enriching: relationship troubles between Will and his girlfriend Leigh (Mikal Evans); Elizabeth’s (Brianne Moncrief) awkwardness as the outsider in the group; and Dallas’ (Luke Robertson) mounting agitation at the absence of Henry’s sister, Sarah (Samantha Soule). Eventually, a dogged police detective (Lindstrom) begins skulking about and engaging in some highly questionable search and seizure practices.

How's screenplay desperately could have used further revisions, at it is swollen with needless character details, repetitive scenes, and go-nowhere subplots. The script doesn’t feel so much unpolished as half-finished and undisciplined. The cast could have been pruned of one or two characters with no discernible effect on the story, beyond tightening it up considerably. Certainly, Henry’s girlfriend Anne (Cassandra Freeman) serves no particular purpose in the narrative, and Leigh mostly drops out of sight after a quarrel with Will. At times, distracting implausibilities bring the film screeching to a halt—as in the aforementioned dodgy policework—which is unfortunate given that How’s dominant sensibility is that of a tightening vice. The film’s performances are serviceable but mostly unremarkable. Burnett must carry most of the scenes, and he rises to the occasion capably. While his Everyman good looks and laid-back demeanor initially seem a poor fit for a criminal schemer, Burnett shapes Henry into a credible character: perceptive, quick-witted, smooth at deception, and wracked with secret anguish.

Despite the script’s serious issues, there is something unsettling about How. It’s in the strange menace that Lindstrom evokes from the alluring summer beaches of the film’s Rochester, New York setting and from Henry’s breezy, slightly gaudy home. It’s in the way that the film’s indefinite sympathies and narrative obliqueness recall Hitchcock and Haneke, respectively, without making a self-important point about doing so. It’s the sudden manner in which the film’s deliberateness and understatement give way to sickening brutality in the third act, such that it seems like a chilling plunge into gangster or horror cinema.  At the SLIFF screening, Lindstrom cited The Virgin Spring as an influence, but it is Wes Craven’s post-Manson family remix of that film, The Last House on the Left, that seems more closely entwined with How's darkling aspect. Such points of engagement render How We Got Away With It a far more intriguing work than its distressingly rough-edged story would otherwise suggest.

SLIFF 2013: This Is Where We Live

2013 // USA // Josh Barrett and Marc Menchaca // November 23, 2013 // Digital Theatrical Projection (Landmark Tivoli Theatre)

[Full Disclosure: This Is Where We Live was one of five debut feature films in the juried New Filmmaker’s Forum competition at the 2013 St. Louis International Film Festival. I served on the NFF jury, which ultimately awarded the NFF Emerging Director Award to This Is Where We Live directors Josh Barrett and Marc Menchaca on November 24, 2013. This review is intentionally biased to provide an affirmative, constructive evaluation of the film.]

The nickel summary of Josh Barrett and Marc Menchaca’s debut feature, This Is Where We Live, creates a very specific set of expectations. In the hill country of central Texas, thirtysomething handyman Noah (Menchaca) is abruptly pulled into the lives of the troubled Sutton family to work as a caretaker for young adult son August (Tobias Segal), whose cerebral palsy has rendered him nearly immobile and non-verbal. As one might expect, bonds are formed, friction arises, and wisdom is attained. It’s the sort of story that naturally lends itself to cloying, faux-uplifting cinema, palatable to middlebrow art house audiences and completely unmemorable.

What makes This Is Where We Live so distinctive is its tart refusal to fulfill these expectations. The film consistently avoids cliche in favor of a nuanced, authentic portrait of a hard-bitten, blue collar Middle America.  Much of the credit is due to Menchaca’s script, with a story assist provided by Barrett. Where some screenwriters might be tempted to subvert the well-worn formulae of indie drama by exploding it, the writers of This Is Where We Live take a gentler approach. The film refuses to confine its characters within tired archetypes, and favors a naturalistic story progression over contrived plot developments.

A case in point is Noah himself, who in a lesser feature would be a colossal jerk who discovers his capacity for selfless compassion by tending to August’s needs. In fact, Noah’s good-natured character is apparent from the outset, as evidenced by his joking manner with August and his unflinching acceptance of matriarch Diane’s (C.K. McFarlane) job offer. Yet Noah is no angel: frequently frustrated by August's actions and his own inability to communicate effectively with the man, their relationship is a fitful and uneasy one. Although the handyman’s time with the Suttons throws new light on his own troubled history, Noah’s personal journey is not the most conspicuous aspect of the film’s story. Rather, This Is Where We Live is primarily a tale of clashing personalities and assumptions, where the dynamics between the abled and disabled—and between family and outsider—play a crucial role.

Another prominent example of the film’s heterodox qualities is long-suffering Diane, who would normally be the most sympathetic character in the story. She’s a pummeled and exhausted woman, drowning under the demands of her afflicted son, a husband (Ron Hayden) suffering from early dementia, and a listless, combative daughter (Frankie Shaw). To these burdens are added Diane's own secret help problems and the sadly typical economic hardships of small town life. Yet while Barrett and Menchaca present Diane as pitiable, she is a hardly a self-sacrificing saint. Her dyspeptic, stodgy, and over-protective tendencies set her into conflict with her family and with Noah, whose almost naive eagerness to make August happy leads him to stray from his caregiver duties into the questionable role of best pal. Diane watches over her son jealously, and is loathe to allow anyone else decide what is best for her family.

This sort of off-center approach to what could have been a irksome, saccharine tale is essential to the appeal of This Is Where We Live. Perhaps it’s a bit of a backhanded compliment to assert that a work’s finest achievement rests on what it doesn’t do, but there is still plenty to admire in the film’s acting and aesthetics. Segal, who does not have cerebral palsy, dives into the role of August with ferocity and delicacy in equal measure, without making the film all about his necessarily splashy performance. (August’s condition is not the central pillar of the film, but more akin to the star around which the story's events orbit. The distinction is vital.) The rest of the cast is also in fine form, with Hayden in particular making a strong impression. Cinematographer Ryan Booth provides the Lone Star landscape with a glint of loveliness to offset all the dust and peeling paint, recalling a lo-fi version of Bradford Young’s recent work on another Texas tale, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints.

The missteps in This Is Where We Live are mostly at the high-altitude level. It’s hard to find fault with any scenes when they are considered individually, but as a whole the assembled film has a certain shagginess to it, and an unfortunate habit of repeating itself. Although it is already lean at 92 minutes, a bit of bloody-mindedness in the editing room could have made the film positively hum. At times, Barrett and Menchaca treat some aspects of the story with such a light touch that it seems less like dog-eared realism and more like gratuitous elision. In particular, Noah’s past remains a foggy cluster of grief and resentments, which wouldn’t be a concern if the film didn’t regard that past as an essential aspect of his character. These complaints aside, This Is Where We Live is a remarkably strong first-time feature. A consistently surprising and carefully considered work, it reveals that complex human drama is still out there, waiting to be discovered in the substrate of rural America. It feels true, which is a rarified thing in an increasingly flattened and unadventurous topography of indie filmmaking.

SLIFF 2013: 9 Full Moons

2013 // USA // Tomer Almagor // November 22, 2013 // Digital Theatrical Projection (Landmark Tivoli Theatre)

[Full Disclosure: 9 Full Moons was one of five debut feature films in the juried New Filmmaker’s Forum competition at the 2013 St. Louis International Film Festival. I served on the NFF jury, and spoke with director Tomer Almagor briefly at the SLIFF Closing Night Party. This review is intentionally biased to provide an affirmative, constructive evaluation of the film.]

Perhaps more than any other American city, Los Angeles has a distinctive mood. It’s a schizophrenic mingling of glamour and sleaze, promise and disillusionment, warmth and alienation. Numerous films have succeeded in capturing that aura, although in most cases the City of Angels also plays an essential role in the narrative (see: Sunset Blvd., Chinatown, Boyz n the Hood, L.A. Confidential, Mulholland Drive). A rarer subspecies of the L.A. film is one in which any city could have sufficed as a setting, but the distinctive Angelino vibe is so potently expressed, one can't imagine the film unfolding anywhere else (see: Double Indemnity, Short Cuts, Heat, Punch-Drunk Love, Drive).

Into this latter category one can place writer-director Tomer Almagor's debut feature, 9 Full Moons, a romantic tragedy that gets the peculiar L.A. mood exactly right. The film admittedly leans towards the desolate. 9 Full Moons is a story of simple dreams that are variously stalled, derailed, and crushed, usually as a result of plain old human fallibility. Although Almagor slides in the odd scene of sun-drenched contentment, the look of the film's nocturnal sequences leaves the strongest impression. It is a nightscape of desperation and discontent. There are dive bars dense with smoke and neon gloom, cold suppers waiting in shadowed kitchens, and midnight streets awash in sickly, sodium-yellow light.

It is a fitting setting for what is, at bottom, a straightforward tale of Boy Meets Girl, Boy Loses Girl. The fellow in question is the guileless, square-jawed Lev (Brett Roberts), an aspiring audio engineer who makes ends meet as a car service driver. One night he crosses paths with alluring wild girl Frankie (Amy Seimetz), and they eventually tumble into bed, where they exhibit an urgency and vulnerability that seems novel for both of them. What follows is an intense but erratic romance characterized by alternating periods of domestic bliss and explosive resentment. The conflicts that arise are mostly prosaic clashes of personality: Frankie is restless and hostile, while Lev is negligent and befuddled. However, Almagor—and Seimetz in particular—lend the story an anguished vividness that overcomes the banality inherent to relationship drama.

Who ultimately bears responsibility for Lev and Frankie's charred ruin of a relationship is a contentious question, but 9 Full Moons is not especially concerned with moralizing or laying blame. The tone of the film is one of sorrowful observation. Frankie is a profoundly wounded person: an abused self-harmer who yearns for the stability of a loving partner, but whose self-loathing compels her to drink and carouse with the creeps at the corner watering hole. Lev's fumbling attempts at emotional intimacy are sweet but often tone-deaf, and he becomes distant as professional opportunities begin demanding more of his time. Yet his most significant failing as a partner is his latently sexist assumption that all Frankie needs is a good man to save her, coupled with his narcissistic belief that he is the man to do it. Watching as happiness slips through these characters' fingers carries an ache that resonates with the film’s evocative depiction of L.A.

Where 9 Full Moons tends to stumble is in its performances and screenplay.  Roberts, bless his wavy romance novel locks, just isn’t acting at the same level as Seimetz, and this gap muffles the romantic chemistry and searing catharsis that the story demands. Roberts is adept at registering a kind of expectant uneasiness, which is fitting for Lev, but it doesn’t exactly make for electric leading man material. Almagor’s script, meanwhile, devotes an unnecessary amount of time to a subplot about washed-up country music star Charlie King Nash (Donal Logue), who draws Lev into his orbit. Logue’s presence is always a pleasure, and this narrative tangent does indeed have ripple effects on Lev and Frankie’s life together, but too often it feels like a distraction. The slender thematic echoes and counterpoints provided by Lev’s whirlwind relationship with Nash aren’t worth diverting attention away from the film’s primary plot. When 9 Full Moons is focused on the forlorn two-person saga of Lev and Frankie, it’s at its most affecting and intriguing.

SLIFF 2013: Farah Goes Bang

2013 // USA // Meera Menon // November 22, 2013 // Digital Theatrical Projection (Landmark Tivoli Theatre)

[Full Disclosure: Farah Goes Bang was one of five debut feature films in the juried New Filmmaker’s Forum competition at the 2013 St. Louis International Film Festival. I served on the NFF jury, and spoke with director Meera Menon briefly at the SLIFF Closing Night Party. This review is intentionally biased to provide an affirmative, constructive evaluation of the film.]

The conventions of the road movie and sex comedy are blended with dashes of multicultural wit and liberal politics in director Meera Menon’s sprightly debut feature, Farah Goes Bang. The eponymous Farah (Nikohl Boosheri) is a sunny but faintly shy Persian-American, who in the autumn of 2004 finds herself newly single and in a post-graduation slump. Her Type A Indian-American friend Roopa (Kiran Deol) has coerced her to leave California behind and stump for John Kerry in the purplish wilds of Ohio. Also along for this cross-country road trip is token white girl K.J. (Kandis Erickson), who shares her friends’ politics, but is a bit more of a prickly slacker at heart.

For Farah, this odyssey represents not only the opportunity to oust the despised George W. Bush from office, but a chance to finally lose her virginity. (There will be, presumably, an abundance of hot progressive guys in Ohio.) Her quest has little to do with love or relationships: it’s all about Farah getting past her sexual hang-ups so she can get on with the business of being an adult. Of course, declaring that her cherry will be popped by Election Night come hell or high water creates a lot of pressure. The situation is not helped by Roopa and K.J.’s good-natured teasing, or the expectations implicit in the economy size box of Trojans stashed in the back of the car.

The film’s screenplay, by Menon and Laura Goode, is fairly straightforward indie dramedy fare. Naturally, the women joke, quarrel, and reconcile along the way. Naturally, they cross paths with a diverse array of mostly one-dimensional characters, from the obligatory bigots to a sassy drag queen. Naturally—spoiler alert!—Farrah does indeed lose her virginity, and beneath a night sky blooming with fireworks, no less. The story is pleasant and fluffy without being syrupy, although there’s little to distinguish it from countless other Sundance-friendly tales about stalled twentysomethings and Middle American dysfunction.

That said, Menon and Goode enliven the proceedings a bit with odd twists and memorable moments. Some of these are deliciously crude, as in Farah’s attempt to preemptively break her hymen with a plastic toy gun in a gas station bathroom. Others are genuinely affecting, such as a scene where K.J. spontaneously opens up to a prospective voter while working the Kerry phone banks. (Menon rather cunningly presents this exchange so that only K.J.’s side of the conversation can be heard.)

The pall that hangs over the film, of course, is that the viewer knows exactly how the 2004 election ended: with four more calamitous years in the reign of C-Plus Augustus, to borrow Charles Pierce’s memorable title for the 43rd U.S. President. This is foreshadowed in the women’s awkwardly defensive pro-Kerry pitch, which is focused on correcting misinformation about their candidate’s war record. An old political adage seems applicable: when you’re spending your time fending off the other candidate’s attacks, you’re losing. In the disappointing aftermath of Election Night, the women concede that they were never that enthusiastic about John Kerry after all. This declaration has the whiff of sour grapes, but it’s also a broader admission that maybe the choices the women have made haven’t always been the wisest. Where Farah’s first taste of the dirty deed is concerned, however, there are no regrets.

SLIFF 2013: Michael Kohlhaas

2013 // France / Germany // Arnaud des Pallières // November 21, 2013 // Digital Theatrical Projection (Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

Director Arnaud des Pallières’ bold, spellbinding new feature, Michael Kohlhaas, announces its strange sensibility in its first scene. In a long shot, a small team of horses trots along a rocky, windswept ridge beneath a strip of gloomy, overcast sky. The light is dim and gray-brown, and the animals are observed from a low angle, as though the viewer were at the foot of a steep hill. The men guiding the beasts press on against the whistling gale, laboring to keep their team moving forward. The forbidding and enormously potent mood conjured by this early scene persists throughout Pallières’ film. It is a bleak but complex aura, encompassing strands of cruelty, futility, exposure, and remoteness. It seems as though one is watching the film’s events from a distance, through the eyes of a primeval, cold-hearted deity. The effect is astonishingly powerful and unsettling.

Adapted from Heinrich von Kleist’s 19th-century novella of the same name—which was in turn inspired by historical events—Pallières’ film relates the tragic account of Michael Kohlhass (Mads Mikkelsen), an upright but strong-willed horse dealer in 16th-century France. (The book was previously adapted in 1969 by Volker Schlöndorff, who retained the source material’s German setting.) Kolhaas is taking his stock to market one day when he is stopped by agents of the local Baron (Swann Arlaud). Using a paperwork discrepancy as a pretext, the Baron’s men seize two of Kohlhaas’ finest animals as collateral. When the horses are later returned to Kohlhaas, they have been worked and abused almost to the point of death—and his protesting servant has been mangled by the Baron’s dogs for good measure.

The arbitrary viciousness of the Baron’s actions provokes Kohlhaas’ distinctly middle class sense of outrage. Unfortunately, the Baron’s political connections stymie Kohlhaas’ efforts to obtain a legal remedy for his grievances, which prompts his wife Judith (Delphine Chuillot) to travel to the court of the Princess (Roxane Duran) and plead her husband’s case. The Baron’s response to this move is dire and bloody, but rather than terrorizing Kohlhaas into silence, it only ignites the man’s righteous fury. Gathering together a small band of lowborn allies, he launches a pitiless guerrilla assault on the Baron’s keep. From there, Kohlhaas’ vengeance evolves into an uprising against the landed nobility, threatening the stability of the whole region.

The bare bones of Michael Kohlhaas' story—violent personal revenge mutates into a full-blown military campaign—have been featured in other films, but rarely, if ever, in such an unconventional manner. Pallières’ style is grim and unhurried, full of carefully chosen words and long pauses. The film watches as characters think, ruminating on their choices and their fates. It eschews music and fills the air with oppressive, unremitting sounds: shrieking winds, tolling bells, buzzing flies. It gazes out on the harsh Massif landscape of crags, valleys, and forests with a kind of Old Testament callousness. A glib description of the film might be “Braveheart as directed by Béla Tarr,” but Pallières has no taste for either Gibson’s testosterone-fueled action or Tarr’s figurative surrealism. Michael Kohlhaas is a remorselessly realistic and unromantic vision of the past: chilly, filthy, and brutal.

Pallières’ treatment of violence is emblematic of the film’s attitude. There are two major “action” scenes in Michael Kohlhaas, and neither is approached in an orthodox manner. Kohlhaas’ attack on the Baron’s stronghold is staged as a stealth thriller sequence, with crossbow-wielding partisans inching silently from one shadowy chamber and stairwell to the next, slaying anyone who resists their advance. In a later battle scene that pits Kohlhaas’ small mounted forces against those of a nobleman, the film regards the bloodshed from atop a nearby hill. In the distance, the combatants clash in near silence, with Kohlhaas’ fighters routing the enemy after a minute or two. These atypical depictions of warfare don’t exactly deglorify the violence on display—the first sequence in particular is still tense and gripping—but they do reveal that Michael Kohlhaas cannot properly be described as a War Movie, at least in the sense in which the label is traditionally used.

The film’s most pivotal moments occur not on the battlefield, but in urgent one-to-one conversations, usually where a character attempts to dissuade another from a particular course of action. It’s no accident that most of the film’s characters are identified only by generic, one word descriptors. A sympathetic Preacher (David Kross) serves as Kohlhaas’s conscience, the Governor (Bruno Ganz) as the voice of conservatism, and the Theologist (Denis Lavant) as an advocate for pacifism. Kohlhaas’ discussions with these characters tackle weighty matters, such as the morality of vengeance and the legitimacy of violent resistance. The talent of the performers and the strength of the screenplay by the director and Christelle Berthevas are such that these exchanges never feel stilted or didactic. The viewer is invited, through Kohlhaas’ experiences, to regard such issues with the soberness they deserve.

This is not to say that Michael Kohlhass is merely an arid thesis paper wrapped in 16th-century vermin and offal (although it is that to an extent). The ponderous but ruthless advancement of the story is essential to the film’s palpable air of doom. Much of that story is conveyed through protracted, exacting observation of characters: the small intimacies between a husband and wife, the restrained ritual of political negotiations, or the dread-choked formalities of a state execution. Elsewhere, Pallières illustrates events through moody, often wordless montage sequences. Kohlhaas’ merciless attack on a convent takes this form: nuns hasten through austere hallways, arrows are set aflame, an abbess prostrates herself, and the convent burns in the twilight. Through such means, the director evokes a sense of implacable cosmic retribution. God does not care whether a person is charitable, honorable, or humble: eventually, they will pay for their sins. The sole mote of light in Pallières’ film is Kohlhaas’ kind-hearted adolescent daughter Lisbeth (Mélusine Mayance), who the rebel rather amazingly succeeds in protecting from his enemies. In all likelihood, the malevolence of the world will someday stain even her virtue. However, the viewer—like Kohlhaas—does not know her fate after the curtain falls, and in uncertainty there is always a shimmer of hope.

SLIFF 2013: The Kill Team

2013 // USA // Dan Krauss // November 20, 2013 // Digital Theatrical Projection (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

It’s been a strong year for advocacy documentaries, with Blackfish, Dirty Wars, The House I Live In, and Inequality for All making deft, passionate cases for political and social change.  Director Dan Krauss’ heart-rending new feature, The Kill Team, is another impressive entry in this subgenre, but it cuts to the quick in a way that surpasses its contemporaries. As with Blackfish, Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s galvanic exposé of Sea World’s cruelties, The Kill Team functions according to a “watch and promote” model. Although a second viewing would have little value, The Kill Team is the sort of eye-opening film that compels one to command friends, relatives, co-workers, acquaintances, and strangers on the street to “See. This. Film.” At risk of sounding speciesist, The Kill Team ultimately edges Blackfish due to its human subject matter. While keeping orcas in captivity is a barbarity, the perverse effects of war on the warrior’s psyche are a far more immediate and pervasive issue.

Proximally, The Kill Team concerns the Maywand District killings: the cold-blooded murder of Afghan civilians by a group of U.S. Army infantrymen in 2010. The only motive for these homicides appears to have been a bloodthirsty longing for the prestige associated with slain insurgents. When the soldiers became frustrated with the lack of opportunities for “legitimate” killings, they decided to start firing their rifles and tossing grenades at random farmers and clerics. Like corrupt cops closing ranks after a dirty shoot, the self-described Kill Team planted weapons and coordinated their stories to deflect suspicion. Not content with premeditated murder, some of the soldiers went so far as to collect grisly trophies of fingers, teeth, and other body parts from their victims.

Several soldiers were implicated in the slayings, but Krauss’ film focuses on Specialist Adam Winfield, a then 21-year-old kid from a Florida military family. While he was involved in the Kill Team’s appalling crimes, Winfield was the only soldier to react with substantial shock and disgust at the actions of fellow platoon members. After the first murder, Winfield quietly alerted his father Christopher to the situation via Facebook chat, expressing his disillusionment and horror, as well as his fear for his own life should his whistleblowing be exposed to the platoon. Winfield asked his father to report the incident to the Army and seek protection on his behalf. Where events went from there is best left for the viewer to discover, but suffice it to say that Winfield was thrown into a waking nightmare with his vicious Army “brothers” on one side and the service’s monolithic criminal justice bureaucracy on the other.

The Kill Team is plainly sympathetic to both Winfield’s plight and that of his anguished parents, who devote every ounce of energy and minute of time to the coordination of their son’s legal defense.  In one of the film’s most overwhelming scenes, his mother Emma begins explaining her views on her son’s case with a lawyer, and is soon pouring forth her maternal rage and woe. Meanwhile, Winfield sits nearby, focused on a laptop screen, rigorously keeping his eyes averted from his mother. (Whether this is from embarrassment or another reason is never entirely clear.) These kind of poignant moments abound in Krauss’ film, which uses talking head interviews, fly-on-the-wall observation, and footage from Afghanistan to construct a tale with deeper emotional, sociological, and philosophical ambitions than those of punchy news reports. While it necessarily recites the established facts of the Kill Team’s crimes, the film is particularly interested in how the soldiers’ savagery and the Army’s indifference exemplify larger institutional evils.

Krauss permits many of the Kill Team members to tell their stories in their own words, although the monstrous ringleader, Staff Sergeant Calvin Gibbs, is pointedly absent. These soldiers rarely evince the sort of remorse that their crimes would seem to warrant, but they all concede that their deeds are consistent with the mindset of the U.S. military rank-and-file, particularly the infantry. The bloodlust that Army training promotes in men in their late teens and early twenties—when such overgrown boys are at the peak of their aggressive tendencies—is a feature, not a bug. While the members of the Kill Team have an interest in shifting blame to organizational failures, their criticisms of Army culture sound less like attempts to minimize their responsibility, and more like the bitter wisdom of men whose unthinkable experiences have rendered them prematurely old. As The Kill Team makes clear, the actions of the platoon and the injustices done to Adam Winfield are likely to inspire outrage, but there are more urgent matters at play than those surrounding the specific events detailed in the film. As long as American troops are honored and socially rewarded for killing above all else, there will be an twisted incentive to murder, which means more dead civilians and more imprisoned soldiers.