TERRITORIES - ***

Directed by Olivier Abbou. Starring Roc LaFortune, Sean Devine, Nicole Leroux. Horror/Drama, USA, 92 mins, cert 18.

More backwoods survival horror, this time not played for laughs or cheap thrills but with an overtly political agenda with some genuinely unpleasant scenes of violence and torture. That's not to say this is a bad thing, but in a sense the lessons are unlikely to convert anyone: if you believe the reported regime at Guantanamo Bay is A Good Thing you're not going to be swayed by the film's anti stance, and if you think abuse and humiliation are Bad Things then the film isn't telling you anything new or shockingly different. And TERRITORIES (which was going to be retitled CHECKPOINT) isn't really telling you very much more than "torture is bad, mmm'kay?".

On the US-Canadian border, a car with five people - two couples and the mute asthmatic brother of one of the girls travelling back from a wedding - is stopped by a pair of uniformed guards. What appears to be a routine security check quickly turns ugly as the guards go beyond their apparent levels of authority, culminating in the shooting of one of the five and the transportation into the woods in metal cages and orange jumpsuits. The "uniformed officers" have no official status and are simply ex-military types still following their former Guantanamo orders: imprisoning those they deem to be suspicious in intent or appearance (crucially one of the five is of Asian descent), supposedly in the name of protecting their country and its freedoms. Even though they've obviously done nothing wrong (with the exception of possession of a small amount of marijuana) the five are locked up and interrogated, stripped, branded and tortured by two guys who are nothing more than woodland loonies doing what they can for their country in the name of the War On Terror.

Rather than contributing to any debate about balancing security with liberty, and examining the justifications for torture, the film isn't really saying very much that many people don't already agree or disagree with (and it's unlikely to change minds either way), and is as much a controversial political statement as another entry in the rural horror genre, with innocent rich city folk trapped in the wilderness at the mercy of backwoods crazies and their unreasoning mindset - it doesn't matter that the five are entirely innocent of anything; the fact that one is of Jewish descent and another of Middle Eastern appearance is enough.

I honestly cannot say I enjoyed TERRITORIES - it has absolutely no humour or lightness about it - but it's not an uninteresting film: it's certainly grim and nasty and believable, effectively done, although I figured the border guards weren't really border guards quite early on. On that level it's also quite sobering as this could happen to anyone at any time for any reason and miles from nowhere: if it happened to you, what could you do? It's also unsettling in that a lot of time is spent with the captors and their twisted illogic rather than the captives panicking and shrieking as in many abduction/false imprisonment/torture movies. Worth seeing.

Richard Street.

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