The succession of tense shootouts and standoffs that ensues is sporadically paused as the film earnestly addresses the impact of PTSD on emergency services professionals, though viewers will be more invested in elaborately physical setpieces. A spectacularly staged police van crash provides his escape route: The chase, on all sides, is on. Shadowy defense contractor M-Tech appears to be targeting a long list of inexplicably connected individuals, and with police detective Rene Williamson (Gail Mabalane) hardly inclined to listen to his frantic explanations, he has little choice but to investigate the conspiracy himself, on the fly. Suddenly, Angela’s brushed-off warning to him that he’s in danger - following a tip-off from a mysterious informant - doesn’t sound so paranoid. Relations with his patient journalist wife Angela (Nicole Fortuin) are strained, and at least verbally violent: When he wakes up the morning after a shouting match to find her strangled to death beside him, the evidence is not in his favor. Months later, we find him suspended from his job and attempting to dull his trauma with alcohol, a method he finds more effective than those practiced in mandatory sessions with a brisk psychotherapist (Susan Danford). At considerable risk, he defies protocol to rescue a baby from a burning dwelling, with tragic consequences that emerge in haunted flashback. Charismatic leading man Jarrid Geduld, too, fares best when the film opts for less talk and more action: Though the script saddles his protagonist, Theo Abrams, with a weighty psychological backstory, he’s most engaging and sympathetic in stretches of in-the-moment, on-the-move panic, pragmatism and rage - as the film bounces him between plot points pulled from “The Fugitive,” “The Bourne Identity” and even “The Manchurian Candidate.”Ī vividly shot, suitably claustrophobic prologue establishes the source of Theo’s issues, as he and his fellow firemen battle a catastrophic blaze in a deprived Cape Flats township. His writing leaves somewhat more to be desired, when it comes to both the film’s rather flat, declarative dialogue (“I have proof of a huge government conspiracy,” a character declares early on) and its halting, occasionally murky storytelling. Hitherto best known for the Netflix series “Blood & Water,” he shows enough directorial style and athleticism here to handle a more expensive production with more moving parts. ![]() “Indemnity’s” far fleeter middle section, however, is both a clear glimpse of the tense, tidy 90-minute exercise it could have been, and an enticing calling card for Taute himself. A far stricter edit could have solved a number of problems in this unevenly paced and, at 124 minutes, significantly overlong film, which is both slow to get going and repetitive in its denouement.
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