Mine (2016)

Armie Hammer plays a United States Marine sniper who, having botched an assassination in North Africa, finds himself standing on an unmapped landmine in the desert with one foot planted and nowhere to go. For roughly ninety minutes he stands there. He is visited by hallucinations, sandstorms, dogs, insurgents, and one Berber hermit who lost a leg to the same sort of device and offers encouragement. His spotter, played briefly by Tom Cullen, removes himself from the narrative with a pistol. This is a survival exercise, and it is content to be one.

For those of us who keep ledgers, the picture offers little to record. The cast is white to a man, with the North African setting functioning as terrain and nothing more. A Berber character appears, speaks a little English, dispenses folk wisdom, and departs. Race is never examined, only dressed. The girlfriend exists in flashbacks, where she serves as a photograph that breathes, motivating our hero toward a final proposal and no further. There is no romantic or political subtext to speak of, no environmental grievance lodged against the desert, no economic critique, no meditation on the body, none of the neurological framing that would recast a man's hallucinations as identity. The trauma here is simply trauma, old-fashioned and untreated.

The film's indifference to social questions is matched by its indifference to preaching. There is no lecture, no moral appended before the credits, no invitation to examine our complicity in anything at all. A mine is a mine. A man stands on it. That is the extent of the argument, and the film has the good sense not to pretend otherwise. A austere vintage, thin on the nose, and it will not be cellared.