Review: 'The Mauritanian' is an unflinching drama about one detainee's horrific time at Guantanamo Bay

In the harrowing true-life drama “The Mauritanian,” audiences are confronted with America’s foreign policy and its most horrific symbol of injustice and fear in the name of security: The American prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Guantanamo Bay — a U.S. military base conveniently out of the reach of most American jurisprudence — is where Mohamedou Ould Salahi (played by Tahar Rahim) spends most of the 14-plus years in which he was held captive by U.S. forces. Detained by corrupt law officers in Mauritania, he is ultimately accused of being the recruiter for Al Qaeda who, while a student in Germany, befriended a couple of the men who flew planes into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

Salahi’s case, four years after that attack, becomes a high priority for the Bush administration, who want to see Salahi tried, convicted and executed. The prosecutor brought on board is Stuart Couch (Benedict Cumberbatch), a Marine attorney whose moral rectitude is as thick as his Southern accent.

Taking up Salahi’s defense is Nancy Hollander (Jodie Foster), an ACLU attorney who sees in her client’s captivity a snake pit of constitutional violations. Aided by a young lawyer, Teri Duncan (Shailene Woodley), Hollander fights the secrets-obsessed bureaucracy surrounding Guantanamo, and convinces Salahi to write her letters that reveal the stomach-churning details of the interrogation techniques used on him.

Director Kevin Macdonald (“The Last King of Scotland”) pulls no punches in depicting the waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other techniques of “enhanced interrogation” — or, as sensible people who aren’t hiding their crimes call it, torture. The description Macdonald and screenewriters M.B. Traven, Rory Haines and Sohrab Noshirvani give to the torture Salahi suffered is frightening and infuriating.

In a cast with such heavyweights as Foster and Cumberbatch, Rahim (the star of the French prison drama “A Prophet”) is compelling, and Macdonald makes a wise choice to center the film around his performance. His take on the character is carefully ambiguous, so the audience isn’t sure for a long time whether Salahi is an innocent man caught in hell or a cagey terrorist sympathizer manipulating this situation for his own gain.

“The Mauritanian” isn’t likely to sway opinion about Guantanamo Bay or America’s shameful record of civil rights after 9/11 — those attitudes are too deeply engrained by now. But as a first-person account of the toll left by America’s embrace of such torture, the movie is thorough, arresting and alarming.

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‘The Mauritanian’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, February 12, in theaters where open. Rated R for violence including a sexual assault, and language. Running time: 129 minutes.