The Road to Guantanamo, co-directed by Michael Winterbottom (24 Hour Party People, In This World) and newcomer Mat Whitecross, is the true and controversial story of the Tipton Three, a group of British Muslims taken prisoner in Afghanistan by the U.S. military under the suspicion of being terrorists. Prior to being released, the three were held without charges for over two years in the now infamous maximum-security prison in Guantanamo Bay until their release in 2004.

The three friends in question, Ruhel, Asif, and Shafiq, (all in their late teens and early twenties) hailed from a small English town called Tipton and seem imbued with youthful optimism at the outset. After Asif (played by Arfan Usman) travels to Pakistan to meet his soon-to-be wife in the fall of 2001, his friends Ruhel (Farhad Harun) and Shafiq (Riz Ahmed) decide to join him for the wedding.

While there, the boys decide to visit Afghanistan to do some humanitarian work. A series of circumstances sidetrack their journey back to Pakistan, so while coalition planes (called into service by the 9/11 attacks) drop bombs in the near distance, the boys take refuge in a Taliban stronghold.

When they are captured by the coalition-allied Afghan Northern Alliance, they see U.S. and British troops as their ticket out of the messy situation, if they can convince them they were merely in the wrong place at the wrong time. However, when a seemingly golden opportunity to aid a British commander with some simple translating turns out to be the army’s method for “sorting out the really bad guys,” the boys find themselves in way over their heads.

What follows is a parade of head bags, holding camps, isolation cells, cages, humiliating abuse, and truly cringe-worthy violence subjected upon innocents. These images hit home not because of elaborate design, but rather because simple design yields elaborate results.

The film, which is part documentary, features interviews with the real Tipton Three cut together with a fictional reenactment set against archival newsreel footage.

Handheld camera work makes the depiction of events seem more genuine, which Winterbottom and Whitecross maintain is to allow for an overriding feel of fluid authenticity. Though it might have been tempting to sensationalize some of the more powerful scenes, the directing team never allowed the images onscreen to escape the facts narrated by the men.

The editing mimics the plot-the film opens at a brisk pace with nary a moment for either the audience or the protagonists to stop and think. Much like the audience, the three boys don’t really know how they got to where they are. The frantic flow finally slows when the bleakness of their fortunes has settled in, and nothing is left to do but absorb the pain and contemplate how horribly wrong everything has become.

Winterbottom and Whitecross are in fine company with actors who play the three men. All of them deliver naturalistic and devastating performances, displaying the shift from carefree to desperate to dispirited (especially Farhad Harun who plays the most rebellious of the trio).

The film hinges on these performances, they add humanity to what may otherwise seem like a story of mechanical brutality. Yet, amidst these inhumane conditions emerges a classic narrative, a rite of passage for the three that unexpectedly occurs on foreign soil. Their growth from adolescence to adulthood takes place in chains, and during their confinement they slowly mature from victims to hardened men ready to tell the world to fuck off.

In that respect, The Road to Guantanamo like a post-9/11 coming-of-age road trip, where the hard-learned life lesson demonstrates that the world is ignorant, cruel, and intolerable. Following the arrests of the 17 alleged terrorists in the GTA, and the predictable media frenzy that ensued, the timing for this captivating and hard-hitting horror could not be more relevant. Let us hope that our justice system doesn’t follow that same dark road.

The Road To Guantanamo opens in theatres June 30.

Rating: VVVVV