Essential Killing (2010)

Directed by: Jerzy Skolimowski

Three Americans patrolling across what seems to be the Afghan desert are killed by a confused, frightened (and perhaps unwilling) man (Vincent Gallo) who is then fired on and captured by the patrol’s helicopter support. The temporarily deafened man is processed by his captors (chained, head shaved, dressed in orange) and treated to what are euphemistically known as enhanced interrogation techniques.

When he reveals nothing, he is transported by plane to an unknown destination (probably Poland) and then transferred to a small convoy of vehicles that journey by night across a frozen, mountainous landscape. The van he is in crashes and the prisoner escapes. Over the next few days, he runs, evades, kills and is injured, gradually becoming weaker and more desperate.  Towards the end he has separate encounters with two women in scenes that suggest the director is wishes to highlight a stark contrast between male aggression and female nurturing (the latter of these features a small but moving role for Emmanuelle Seigner, as a woman whose muteness mirrors, in a strangely touching way, the prisoner’s own inability to communicate).

If anything, Skolimowski’s film suffers from a surfeit of integrity, refusing to reveal almost anything about the warrior’s circumstances that he could not have discovered by himself (and sometimes even less than this: a series of dreamlike flashbacks disclose general context rather than specific history and motivation) though the subtitles accorded to his pursuers are a strange exception to this rule. He himself needs no subtitles since he has not one word of dialogue (groans excepted) in the movie. It is a tribute both to the director and to Gallo’s acting that most of the time we can figure out what is going through his head, though some sequences remain rather obscure.

By eliminating so much context, we are forced to confront the prisoner as simply a man, and our sympathy for him rises as he suffers, and falls as he then causes suffering (he kills not only pursuers but also a largely innocent worker).  What would we do in similar circumstances, we seem to be asked – though most people will find it hard to insert themselves fully into this scenario, one hopes.  In the end, the movie is something of a curiosity: a reasonably bold experiment that is just too opaque to have anything very profound to communicate, but it is so well performed by Gallo that it remains a compelling (if painful) viewing experience.