CINEMA: Redacted

Here’s another quasi-documentary that traces the events that led to a bloody massacre. A small group of American soldiers, traumatised by what they have been through in Iraq, decide to exact their own chilling revenge on the local people by raping and murdering a young girl and her family.

Veteran filmmaker Brian De Palma certainly captures the sense of barely-contained hysteria and paranoia within the troops but the film’s cut-up, episodic nature means it judders along rather than seamlessly travelling to its inevitable and horrifying conclusion.

Whereas Out Of The Blue is calm, understated and therefore all the more disturbing, Redacted is rather shouty and theatrical, with far too much time spent with the soldiers involved and not enough with their victims.

This may have worked better within the more intimate confines of a theatre rather than a cinema where the admittedly rather tangled thought processes of the soldiers involved could have been explored minutely. Dee Pilgrim