Kathmandu:

For years Brian De Palma has been on the verge of success but hasn’t quite made it. The director considered most likely to succeed Hitchcock has been trying to find a niche and sometimes almost does with movies like Redacted which is his hardest hitting cinematic experience to date and earned him a Best Director’s Award on the film competition circuit.

Set in Iraq the movie is about a crime and its cover up. Using largely unknown actors and a variety of different cameras the movie shocks and we could easily replace the line ‘Truth is the first casualty of war’ with horror as the first casualty, inhumanity as the second, cruelty, animalism and words that I can’t summon to describe a film about the rape of a 15 year old girl in Iraq as subsequent causalities.

The story is true and whereas it didn’t gain wide publicity in the media, it did on the Internet.

Brian De Palma uses a technique suited to the anger he feels. In the words of Glenn Kenny, “This ‘fictional story inspired by true events’ is written, as it were, by a variety of different cameras. First, there’s the ‘video diary’ of Angel Salazar, a soldier who hopes his work will land him in film school. There’s an impossibly pretentious French documentary — ‘un film de Marc et Francois Clement’ — about the U S soldiers running a Samarra checkpoint. There are ‘reports’ from ‘ATV News,’ an Al-Jazeera-esque outfit, and ‘Central Euro News.’ There’s base security camera footage, various website videos, and more. These can’t be assembled “seamlessly” — that’s just the point — but De Palma still creates a strong narrative thread via these disparate simulated “sources” in a tight 90 minutes.”

Critic Mark Burger adds, “Writer/director Brian De Palma’s treatise on the war in Iraq is raw and ragged, jagged and jarring. It’s not an easy film to watch but it is an important one to see.

The principal events of the film — the calculated rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl by American servicemen — are inspired in part on an actual incident that has been more widely reported on the Internet than on traditional television or mainstream media, which is what inspired De Palma to undertake the film in the first place. The film follows the members of an American unit who have been in Iraq for too long and are frustrated by the experience, to the extent that their collective (and individual) humanity has become eroded. When one of their units is killed in an explosion, they vent their anger in a systematic and surreptitious raid on an Iraqi family’s house, unconcerned by the potential repercussions — on both sides — until after the fact. There are those who perceive the film to be anti-American and, indeed, most of the American characters are fairly despicable in their actions, the fact that they want revenge and are in state of anger for their fallen comrade can never justify their venting it all on an innocent young girl.”

In the end it could be said in charity that the soldiers did not realise the extent of their actions and they want to be out of Iraq as much as anyone else. This is the darker, more vicious, side of the concept of “heroism”— how it is perceived and, in this case, misperceived.

The theme that violence begets violence is hardly a fresh concept, but this time with De Palma it seems horrifyingly, freshly packaged. Which in a violent age could almost be a compliment.