Brian De Palma returns with a visceral, edgy docu-drama re-telling the story of US army atrocities in Iraq.
The film is based on events which took place in 2003 when four US soldiers raped and killed a 14-year-old girl and three members of her family. In some ways this revisits De Palma’s earlier work, Casualties of War, but the veteran director embraces the new technology at his disposal and uses webcams, hand held video camera and the narrative device of one of the soldiers filming a home movie to get his point across.
The brute mentality of the group does not include all of its members and it is left to one of the group to be our representative, ashamed and morally repulsed by what takes place. De Palma fully explores the moral ambiguity of armed combat and the skeletons of US foreign policy and its repercussions for ordinary people.