The Report: A gripping investigation into CIA torture

With commanding performances and a compelling story, you’ll unquestioningly give all your attention to this new movie.

The Report is one of the most gripping movies you’ll see this year.

Directed by Scott Z. Burns, a frequent collaborator of Steven Soderbergh, The Report has been compared to the likes of All the President’s Men and Spotlight, and it very much belongs alongside those venerated films.

Like its predecessors, the premise stems from a dogged investigation into institutional abuse of power, in this case, the use of torture by the CIA in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the resulting 6700-page report of which an explosive 500-page summary was released in December 2014.

But the release of that report was far from assured with the CIA and its supporters in the US government and the White House determined to foil the truth from ever coming out.

That’s the tension in The Report, an incredibly well-paced and tightly constructed film packed with recognisable faces.

For a movie that’s mostly people in a room either talking or looking at a computer screen, it’s incredibly suspenseful — it will command all of your attention and you will give it over completely and unquestioningly.

Adam Driver gives a commanding performance

The Report tells the story of real-life US Senate investigator Daniel Jones (Adam Driver), who in 2009 was working as a staffer for Californian Senator Dianne Feinstein (Annette Bening), the Chair of the powerful Senate Intelligence Committee.

Jones is tasked by the Committee to investigate the CIA’s “Enhanced Interrogation” program of 9/11 detainees. He and a small team are assigned a windowless room with ceiling grates, fluoro lighting and linoleum-tiled floors.

But a process that was supposed to take a few months or a year at the outside, ends up being five years of painstaking research through millions of CIA documents. Burns breaks up these scenes of people working at a desk with briefings, meetings, politicians being testy at each other and flashbacks.

It’s in these flashbacks that pieces of the puzzle come together for the viewer, featuring CIA lawyers, agents, bigwigs and contractors continuously finding ways to skirt the rule of law.

None are more villainous than Jim Mitchell (Douglas Hodge) and Bruce Jessen (T. Ryder Smith), two former air force psychologists who reverse engineered a survival program into a series of techniques that carry innocuous-sounding names like “facial holding”, “walling” and the infamous “waterboarding”, all pseudonyms for torture.

And you know Mitchell is a bad guy because he keeps referring to himself in the third person.

Annette Bening plays real-life Senator Dianne Feinstein

These disturbing and vivid flashbacks of torture and conspiracy become increasingly harder to watch as Burns expertly cranks up the tension and as Jones gets closer and closer to the truth of everything.

The Report is a masterclass in how you build to a climax, especially when you can’t rely on some big third-act action extravaganza.

Driver’s performance is perfectly calibrated, taking Jones on this arc from an even-keeled investigator to someone who, after five years in a basement office and faced with the prospect of the report never coming out, starts to become too emotionally invested.

But there’s a consistency in his characterisation that you can always connect the Jones at the beginning of the film to the one at the end. It’s not an easy thing to do, one overplayed or underplayed moment and it loses its power, especially when his role is so expositional.

You know this is a significant film when it features so many well-regarded actors in tiny roles, including the likes of Tim Blake Nelson, Maura Tierney, Michael C. Hall, Matthew Rhys, Corey Stoll, Carlos Gomez, Jennifer Morrison and Ben McKenzie, while Jon Hamm plays Barack Obama’s chief-of-staff Denis McDonough.

Jon Hamm as Obama’s chief of staff

The only complaint would be — and this is more of an issue outside of the US where our blinkers aren’t so on — is that it reinforces that earnest ideal that the US and its systems are ultimately a force for good, that as long as good people do the right thing, everything will be peachy keen.

The Report never really delves into the culture that allowed these practices to flourish in the first place, never engages with the rot that sits at the heart of many, many powerful institutions, instead chalking it up to a few aberrant bad apples and fear.

It’s what keeps the incredibly compelling The Report from being a perfect movie.

Rating: 4/5

The Report is in cinemas on Thursday, November 14 and will be released on Amazon Prime Video on November 29

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