This harrowing Tv drama by the great Alan Clarke is stark in its depiction of three subjects being tortured by British authorities, a subject that spoke at its time to English viewers aware of the controversial treatment by their government of Irish freedom fighters and that now speaks, since the program has been made available to a wider audience in places like the US, to the later use of torture by the Bush administration in its wars against Afghanistan and Iraq.
Part of the starkness is that we are immediately set in an unnamed interior where the action takes place in a limited number of spaces and we are never given a single establishing exterior shot or any scene outside. Similarly, the American director Samuel Fuller dropped us dramatically into its protagonist's entry into an insane asylum by also never giving us any outdoor footage (except in one of the mental patients' nightmares.)
Part of the starkness is that we are immediately set in an unnamed interior where the action takes place in a limited number of spaces and we are never given a single establishing exterior shot or any scene outside. Similarly, the American director Samuel Fuller dropped us dramatically into its protagonist's entry into an insane asylum by also never giving us any outdoor footage (except in one of the mental patients' nightmares.)
