White Chamber

Writer-director Paul Raschid gives us a sci-fi thriller that takes place almost entirely in and around a hi-tech torture cell – this film's titular "White Chamber" – and yet the 25-year-old first-time filmmaker manages to create a microcosm of fear, aggression, conflict, and anxiety that comments on the human condition, while presenting a story that unfolds in continually startling ways.

The basics are laid out in a pretty straightforward manner: England has fallen into anarchy and civil war, with white nationalists seizing their opportunity to take power and the country's beleaguered minorities, along with their supporters, banding together to fight back. It is, in other words, a Brexit worst-case scenario, and then some.

Under the leadership of a charismatic general (Oded Fehr), the insurgents are on the verge of winning the conflict. But the nation's security forces have a new research initiative focused on creating a synthetic drug that can boost the body's endurance, lower pain thresholds, and induce a near-berserker level of aggression and euphoria in its users. Like the Germans in the World War II era – a nation on the crystal meth-like stimulant Pervitin – the Brits hope to amp up their fighting forces and snuff out the rebellion. This is the British Army on drugs... or that's the plan, anyway.

But the plan goes sideways in a major way. As the film begins, the white chamber is occupied not by the insurgency's general, but by an "admin girl" who claims to be called Ruth (Shauna MacDonald). She doesn't know anything about the operation of the white chamber – a claim her captors don't believe – but either way she learns first hand of it many uses. The chamber is ingeniously conceived so as to inflict an array of torments and psychological pressures... and that's even before the introduction of experimental drugs. Electric shocks from the metal floor, acid dripping from the ceiling's many spouts, extreme heat and humidity, freezing cold, and the chamber's ceaseless white light all combine to create a nondescript and yet exquisitely nerve-wracking environment.

We only understand in the movie's second third that Ruth was not always the chamber's occupant, and that there's been a significant role reversal – but just how this came about, and why, and what it all means is something that's revealed only gradually. Along the way, familiar tropes surface: What's the difference between a freedom fighter and a terrorist? Where does the line belong between the legitimate use of force and a governmental overreach that descends into barbarous sadism? When are the pursuits of science corrupted by the needs of power, and can that corruption ever be excused?

This film is a low-budget gem that often sidesteps its own limitations to conjure broader meanings and hint at a larger, easily-imagined world beyond. In production terms, it's a "bottle show" – a film that's mostly confined to a single location and makes that location as interesting as possible. What Raschid cleverly remembers is that the human mind is the most dramatically compelling locale of all, and his directorial debut, while carrying shades of everything from "1984" to "Death and the Maiden," feels as fresh and fiendishly new as the chamber itself.

Raschid proves himself a talent to be reckoned with. If "White Chamber" turns out to be his springboard, rather than his one-hit wonder, we're in for some top-flight filmmaking from him in years to come.