Kajaki

On patrol near the Kajaki dam in Afghanistan, a British soldier drops into a dry riverbed and steps on a mine. The men who go to help realise the whole area is mined, and from that point the film locks onto a single question: how do you reach him. Paul Katis tells it close to real time, barely changes location, and uses no heroic scoring. The talk between the soldiers is coarse, joking and credible, and the fear is never stated outright. The hardest thing about it is that the medical detail is not softened at all. It is drawn from a real incident and built on the accounts of the men who survived it. Who it is for: viewers who like the unshowy, technical branch of the war film. Who it is not for: anyone who cannot take severe injury on screen, since nothing here is cut away from.