Critics reviews

For all of (T)error's topicality and its thriller-like qualities, what makes the film is Sutcliffe and Cabral's compact, complex portrait of Saeed – paranoid, chatty, mired in self-loathing, but also oddly reflective... [It] goes from being a tense procedural and absorbing character study to an astonishing, real-life satire about the surveillance state. You won't know whether to laugh or cry.

As the documentary progresses (and, unbeknownst to Saeed, begins to follow Khalifa as well), Sutcliffe and Cabral artfully lay bare a formerly secret process, and ultimately pose the question: does the public really benefit from programs that compromise the rule of law they claim to be fighting for?

In a society that breeds fear and turns its undoubting citizens against each other, is there a leeway for justice to prevail? True to Godard's words that all good documentaries tend towards fiction,(T)ERROR brings to us the unbelievable story of a few individuals who get trapped in the system, only because of the colour of their skins and the length of their beards.

For a film that revels in shadows and tight framing,(T)ERROR is revealing, frightening, and—as intended—infuriating. Its portrayal of present-day fear-mongering is arguably more effective than Laura Poitras's Citizenfour (the film's creative consultant) for how brashly the efforts overlap with explicit Islamophobia.

The most artful new films I saw at True/False this year tended to be vague in their sense of political context. The one exception was (T)error, about a former Black Panther-turned-FBI informant and the white Muslim convert he's assigned to entrap in a terror plot. Like Pekosinski, it's a nightmarish comedy about a puppet at the hands of the state, whose massive surveillance campaigns and knotty, oversized bureaucracies come to resemble those of Soviet satellite nations.

It's beyond-commonplace to say a nonfiction film will live or die on the strength of its "characters"—which is to say, the access forged by the filmmakers and their onscreen participants. But good luck imagining a bigger get than Cabral and Sutcliffe's, which started when the former lived upstairs from Torres in Harlem, utterly unaware of his double-agent status.

It's a film that knows quite well what it's doing and why, but also finds purpose in stirring the audience into a state of unease. Where Citizenfour was strident and declamatory, (T)error is slippery, unstable, and personal, adopting an anxiety that mirrors that of the surveillance state it's exposing.

In a newly tightened cut since winning a special jury award at Sundance, (T)ERROR presents a rare and occasionally riveting opportunity to experience a counterterrorism sting from an FBI informant's perspective. Proving that the sexy espionage of Homeland and countless movies is far removed from reality, directors Lyric R. Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe offer an unpretentiously straightforward profile of 63-year-old Muslim and former Black Panther "Shariff"...

Despite its nonfiction framework, (T)error is a master class in narrative storytelling: text messages between Torres and the FBI scroll ominously across the screen in the lead-up to the ill-advised sting, information regarding the protagonists' past associations and transgressions is sparingly and strategically divulged, and the directors expertly shift, and complicate, our sympathies for Torres and Kalifah throughout.

It's a startling expose of just how unglamorous, morally dicey, and frankly janky our domestic spy game is.

The first effort of a new directing team, Lyric Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe, (T)ERROR conveys a sense of absurdity, awe and wonderment.

(T)ERROR displays a staggering propensity for carefully examining its unauthorized scenario without succumbing to either too insular or too general a set of assertions.