White Chamber

The movie's first half-hour is a woman who insists she's a delivery person named Ruth being tortured within a white box by a person that turns out to be the leader of a revolutionary army that is attempting to overthrow a military dictatorship in England.

Right about the point I wondered how the movie could have another hour to go - after Ruth kills a crazed woman with a partially melted face by stabbing her in the eye with a finger that was on the floor - it cuts back to five days earlier, and we learn how things reached this point, and that Ruth isn't who she claims to be. Although the flashback creates more questions which have to be answered in the final 10 minutes when we get more or less back to where the movie began.

The chamber isn't only a torture chamber, and the movie spends some time on the justifications people will make for their actions, the lies they'll tell others or themselves about what they're doing. What does a person who leads a revolution tell himself about the people who die on both sides? Or the person who tests drugs on a prisoner without knowing what it will do to them (or knowing what it will do)?

There are four people outside the chamber in the flashbacks, and at least two seem motivated by grief or revenge, and this is just a convenient opportunity they can pretend is something else. It's for science, or the greater good. One of the others simply hadn't felt affected by the issues that stirred unrest, and didn't know what they were getting into. It was easy enough to believe what they'd been told and to see this as a big chance.

Also kind of hard not to notice the three most staunch in their support of the work they're doing are all white, while the person they have trapped and are torturing/experimenting on is Kurdish, and that the one member of the four who ultimately has doubts is also not white. White Chamber, indeed.

I did laugh when the head honcho shows the newbie all these examples of drugs different groups of soldiers have used over the ages, to demonstrate how it's not a new idea. Except the examples she cites are all from sides that lost the wars she mentions. Oh, the Nazis used this methamphetamine, U.S. soldiers used weed in 'Nam, the Zulus used this to feel invincible when they fought the English in the 1870s. What I'm taking away from this is, winners don't use drugs!

I wouldn't say I liked the movie exactly, but when it started I was worried I'd chosen some kind of torture porn horror flick, like that Saw bullcrap. Simply not being that, or not only that, was a good start. And I knew one of the four was going to help the prisoner escape, and it seemed pretty obvious who, but I was curious if the film was going to pull a fast one late. It didn't.