Charting the life a magistrate (Martin Ryvale) posted at a garrison on the border of what I'm assuming is the British Empire, maybe around what would be Afghanistan today. The magistrate takes a pretty lax approach to his duties, preferring to spend his time sifting through ruins in the surrounding region and recording what he finds there.
As far as he's concerned, there are no troubles with the "barbarians", the nomadic horsemen who move between the plains and the mountains, but Colonel Joll (Johnny Depp), feels otherwise. From there, things begin to fall apart for the magistrate, and the region. Joll takes patrols into the mountains and returns with people he interrogates via "pressure".
After he's departed, the magistrate meets a woman who experienced that torture and forms some sort of relationship with her. I don't know if he's in love with her, or it's a paternal attitude, or merely guilt. Either way, he leads his own patrol in the lands beyond the fort to find some of her people who might return her to her family. This is poorly timed, as he returns to find some lantern-jawed thug (played by Robert Pattinson) of Joll's waiting with several charges.
On the one hand, there's definitely the idea that Joll and his ilk are creating the problems with the locals by going out and attacking them, arresting them, torturing them until they say what Joll wants to hear. I did find it curious that Joll uses pressure as a euphemism for torture. For a man with no bend in him, who believes in the absolute rightness of his duty and his perceptions, who treats the who thing with the assembly line boredom of filling out requisition forms, I wouldn't think he'd see any need to dress up with he does.
Joll encourages the locals who live in the garrison to regard the people still living in the mountains as The Other, to be ridiculed, scorned or beaten. To cheer the British soldiers when they bring in a bunch of prisoners with their hands stitched to their faces, and then connected to each other in a chain by those stitches.
Of course, when all this backfires, as it does, the soldiers flee with their tails between their legs (as well as everything of value in the garrison that wasn't nailed down), leaving the locals whose support they demanded to twist in the wind.
Ryvale plays him as a soft-spoken man with a permanent air of distraction. He's not much of an administrator or adjudicator to the people who live around the garrison - his decision on the man who stole his neighbor's pig to stop it from eating his garden was lazy and half-assed - but he also understands that to the people who were born here, he and the rest of the soldiers are perceived as a passing thing. Transients that will move on eventually. So long as they don't assert themselves, they're tolerated. That's why he perceives there to be no problems.
But he still refers to them as "barbarians", the same as anyone else. From his brief sojourn to return the young woman to her people, he might have realized that the nomads don't see much difference between him and Joll. I think he has his own illusions, maybe some "noble savage" claptrap, maybe just that he views them as part of the scenery he passes by on the way to whatever old ruin he wants to sift through that day. I think the reality he's about to face when the movie ends will be rather different.
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