Imperi­um

There’s an old inter­net adage known as ​‘Godwin’s Law’ which posits that the longer an online debate goes on, the greater the prob­a­bil­i­ty a com­par­i­son with Hitler and/​or Nazism becomes. It’s what’s more com­mon­ly known, at least in offline par­lance, as a con­ver­sa­tion killer. It doesn’t bode well for writer/​director Daniel Ragus­sis, there­fore, that his debut fea­ture opens with an extract from ​‘Mein Kampf’; even less so that the full cita­tion is ago­nis­ing­ly teased out for max­i­mum shock value.

Indeed, ​“words build bridges into unex­plored regions” is the sort of quote you might expect to find in a click­bait lis­ti­cle enti­tled ​‘20 Sur­pris­ing­ly Inspi­ra­tional Quotes from History’s Great­est Shit­bags’, although the man­ner in which it is deployed here some­how feels even more cyn­i­cal and glib than that. But then Imperi­um, it turns out, was co-writ­ten by a bloke called Michael Ger­man. Make of that what you will.

That eye­brow-curl­ing open­er aside, the film sets out its stall as a seri­ous, sen­si­tive look at the ugli­er side of Amer­i­can nation­al­ism. Book­ish FBI agent Nate Fos­ter (Rad­cliffe) is sent in to infil­trate a rad­i­cal ter­ror­ist group who may or may not be plot­ting a major attack in DC. A truck­load of cae­sium (bad stuff) has gone AWOL and Foster’s supe­ri­or, Angela Zam­paro (Toni Col­lette), has a hunch that some local skin­heads might be involved. As with most under­cov­er cop movies, every­thing goes accord­ing to plan until it doesn’t, which makes for sus­pense­ful viewing.

Yet while Imperi­um works as a taut char­ac­ter-dri­ven thriller, it is less suc­cess­ful as a State of the Union address on the issue of home­grown extrem­ism (its most com­pelling, albeit seem­ing­ly inad­ver­tent, state­ment is that domes­tic intel­li­gence is less a game of cat and mouse than pin the tail on the ter­ror­ist). A film star­ring Daniel Rad­cliffe as a rook­ie fed deep under­cov­er in a white suprema­cist cell was always like­ly to stray towards super­fi­cial provo­ca­tion. But here’s the real bomb­shell: he’s aston­ish­ing­ly good.