wmd. Review

Watching wmd. is never going to be an entirely comfortable experience. Apart from the fact that its subject matter is the dubious justification for the Iraq War, it's also just plain ugly visually. The film has a conceit not unlike that used for The Blair Witch Project whereby what we're seeing is 'found footage'. In this case, that footage consists of a CCTV surveillance video and some news clips. Such lo-res imagery is never going to make for amenable cinematic viewing, so it's remarkable that wmd. is actually highly watchable. This is due to the compelling narrative writer-director David Holroyd has created.

Holroyd, who cut his teeth directing TV like 'Bad Girls' and 'The Bill', has made an interesting, intelligent feature debut. For a film Holroyd describes as "a small movie just to get us onto the map", it's a complex affair. Wandering the streets of London, Rome, Berlin and Washington DC, shooting with video cameras and presenting it in the movie as surveillance footage might not sound too demanding, but wmd. is actually a very elaborate construction, cleverly crafted by Holroyd, cinematographer Steve Buckland and editor Celia Haining.

The film closes with the text note saying it's "A fictional story based on real facts", and Holroyd has done his research into the question of whether Sadam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, as claimed by Bush and Blair in 2002 and 2003. It's almost easy to forget now no such WMDs were ever found - so the "facts" that politicians used to justify the war and spin things to the media (and hence the public) increasingly look like lies, or at least serious misinterpretations of intelligence data. This is the murky world wmd. plays out in. Holroyd is effectively using the film to indict politicians where the legal process has failed.