THE MAURITANIAN
OUT 26 FEBRUARY CINEMAS
The true, shocking tale of a long-term Gitmo inmate.
Amasterclass in packing a real-life story with thriller power, this gripping if overstuffed adap of Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s 2015 bestseller about his decade detained in Guantanamo Bay brings all the shocks without trimming the truth.
Ingeniously constructed, it’s a heavyweight piece making smart use of both director Kevin Macdonald’s Oscar-winning documentary talent (see 1999’s pulse-pounding One Day In September) and his gift for daring dramas like The Last King Of Scotland (2006). An ambitious mix of legal thriller, ordeal memoir and conspiracy exposé, The Mauritanian reels us into Slahi’s jaw-dropping tale of illegal detention by loosing activist lawyer Nancy Holland and principled US Navy prosecutor Stuart Couch on opposing, colliding crusades.
Shrewd Nancy (tough-talking Jodie Foster) only wants to end her client’s no-charges-but-no-liberty legal limbo. But Stuart (a starchy, stiff-necked Benedict Cumberbatch) is hellbent on nailing Slahi (a mesmerising Tahar Rahim) as a key 9/11 recruiter. Searching for the truth about his slim Al-Qaeda connections, Nancy grills him at Gitmo while Stuart ransacks forbidden CIA files, until Slahi’s journey from youthful Afghan-trained idealist to torture victim cracks open in twisty flashback testimony.
Unlike accounts like The Road To Guantanamo (2006), the film’s initial ambivalence about Slahi keeps you guessing, unsure whether he’s villain or victim. Yet as Macdonald ratchets up the Gitmo ordeal, with weary CIA cross-examinations succeeded by Military Intelligence’s life-threatening beatings and near-drownings, Slahi’s stubborn fight for survival starts to win you over.
So that’s the grabby, don’t-lookaway half of the story – this is emphatically not a film you can watch with one eye while tweeting. It overshadows Stuart’s strand, an honourable The Report-style slog through legal blockages, where his God-fearing patriotism is rocked by the CIA’s evasions. There’s no way for these segments to compete with the jittery, enveloping immersion of Gitmo torture scenes that show the flip side of Zero Dark Thirty’s ‘enhanced interrogations’. Nightmarish montages of sexual assaults, ocean waterboarding torture and shackled torments, all laced with terrifying close-ups and earbleeding heavy metal, leave the viewer with no escape.
Too crammed with incident to give breathing room to anyone except Slahi, the film restricts Foster mostly to sympathetic-yet-no-pushover client questioning, while Cumberbatch struggles to inject soul into Stuart’s Southern rectitude. So it’s Tahar Rahim’s poignant, bravura performance that ensures the film’s firm grip on you, as Slahi grows from wary despair to dogged determination during his brutal hardships. A vivid portrait of one man’s resilience, this all-out performance should bag the Oscar nom it so richly deserves. Kate Stables