129 min | R | February 12, 2021 | STXfilms
Mohamedou Ould Slahi sits in Guantanamo Bay for years and is never charged with a crime. A defense lawyer fights to free him while a prosecutor builds the case to kill him. The story is damning, but the movie settles for a courtroom drama.
Mohamedou Ould Slahi spends years inside Guantanamo Bay without a charge against him. The United States believes he recruited for the September 11 attacks. It never files an indictment. The film follows the defense attorney who takes his case and the military prosecutor assigned to seek his execution. What it is really about is the machinery that holds a man indefinitely and the documents that machinery would rather not produce.
Tahar Rahim plays Mohamedou Ould Slahi with patience that hardens over the years of detention. He keeps the man charming and watchful even as the interrogations escalate into torture. Jodie Foster plays defense attorney Nancy Hollander as a lawyer who defends the principle and not the client. She refuses to ask whether he did it because the question is beside the legal point. Benedict Cumberbatch plays Lt. Stuart Couch as a prosecutor who reads the case file and loses his certainty. Shailene Woodley plays Teri Duncan, the junior attorney whose resolve wavers, and the script gives her the least to do.
Kevin Macdonald directs from a script by M.B. Bronner, Rory Haines, and Sohrab Noshirvani, adapted from Slahi’s memoir Guantanamo Diary. Macdonald came up in documentary, and he stages the present-day legal scenes with that flat clarity. The interrogation flashbacks switch to a boxed aspect ratio and a grainier handheld texture. That formal break separates the remembered abuse from the procedural present. The technique is the most confident choice in the film, and the courtroom scenes around it stay conventional.
The real story carries more weight than the film built around it. Slahi spends fourteen years in detention and wins a habeas ruling that the government appeals and stalls. The movie reaches for that outrage and then routes it through the familiar beats of a legal drama. Rahim and Foster supply the conviction the structure lacks. The result honors the man without finding the form his story demands.