Essential Killing (Jerzy Skolimowski, 2010)

An insurgent somewhere that may be Afghanistan is taken prisoner by the US military, summarily tortured and then manages to escape. A manhunt through a snowy landscape ensues, and the unnamed and deafened fugitive resorts to increasingly desperate measures in his frenzy to simply survive.
Casting Vincent Gallo as the terrorist/freedom fighter was a masterstroke on the part of the renownedly leftfield Skolimowski: associations with his asshole outsider roles in Buffalo 66 et al. add a further layer of ambiguity to an already interpretationally complex protagonist. He doesn't utter a word, he kills - the title is deliberately vague as to whether it's essential that he kills for survival or is killed for what he is - and we only get vague inklings of his past life through snatches of dream flashbacks. His motivations are never explained: you care just because he's hunted and the story will die without his survival. Skolimowski avoids politicising at all costs, and this includes separating the setting and events from anywhere localisable.
This refusal to commit is both a weakness and an asset: the story is applicable equally to everywhere and nowhere specific. It's perhaps understandable given the director's roots in the Communist era, when toeing the line between The Party and conveying a personal ideological message was a necessary yoke. Hence the eventual hallucinatorily metaphysical air, which owes a great debt to Tarkovsky. But it works.

7/10