103 min | NR | July 30, 2021 | IFC Films
A young Air Force veteran turns whistleblower, claims the FBI is persecuting him, and flees the country. Then the documentary stops trusting him. Sonia Kennebeck builds a film that keeps pulling the floor out from under you.
Matt DeHart is a former Air Force drone team member and Anonymous affiliate who says the government targeted him after he stumbled onto a classified file. His parents believe him. They mortgage their lives to defend him against charges they call retaliation for his activism. Sonia Kennebeck takes that story and refuses to let it stay simple. The film is not about whether the government persecutes whistleblowers. It is about how a story becomes a cause, and how a cause survives contact with the facts.
Joel Widman plays Matt DeHart in dramatized reconstructions that stage the case rather than report it. The performance is deliberately opaque. Widman gives DeHart a flat, watchful quality that lets the audience project guilt or innocence onto him. The real anchors are DeHart’s parents, Paul and Leann, who appear as themselves and carry the emotional weight. Their conviction is total, and the film lets you feel both their love and the possibility that love has blinded them.
Kennebeck writes and directs with a structure built to ambush. She withholds key documents and testimony until the moment they do maximum damage to the version you have just accepted. The reenactments use desaturated, surveillance-flavored cinematography that blurs the line between staged footage and the real record. That choice is the film’s thesis made visible. You cannot tell what is reconstruction and what is evidence, which is exactly the point about a case built on competing claims.
This is a documentary about the collapse of shared truth in the internet age, told through one family that cannot agree with the state on a single fact. Kennebeck values the twist over the argument, and the late reversals sometimes muddy what she is trying to say. But the ambiguity is earned rather than lazy. The film leaves you certain of only one thing. Everyone in this story believes their own version completely, and belief is not the same as proof.