The film is exciting and suspenseful for its first half, but then loses its nerve and wanders around, throwing away many opportunities for drama, including "how would the New York Times react if its deputy London Bureau Chief was suspiciously killed while investigating a British Government terrorism cover-up?"
And it's careless, even amateurish, in small ways, such as not bothering to explain or explore that Bana, an excellent actor, has a marked Australian accent. I'm sure there are Aussie barristers practising in London, but nationality would play a role in how Bana's character came to be where he is, in this ominous political trial as well as in his troubled relationship with Hall's "proper lady". Instead the filmmakers just ignore the implications of their own casting.
Having muttered all that, the film is well worth seeing for those who like to explore alternate "War On Terror" realities.
So far, most of the big newspapers don't seem to have reviewed the movie, which may tell us something in itself.*
Here's a clip to whet your appetite: http://humanoidmanipulator.com/closed-circuit-movie-clip-paranoid-2013-eric-bana-movie-hd/
Socialist David Walsh has written an excellent review, which analyses the political aspects of the film, and nails many of the salient points about the film's significance in our current tumultuous global political situation:
"If Closed Circuit is not as riveting as it ought to be by rights, considering its subject, that may have to do with the artistic limitations of its creators, but, in my view, inadequate social conceptions also come into play. The filmmakers still tend to take the “war on terror” and associated developments at face value, even as they strenuously criticize the authorities’ repressive and even homicidal over-reactions.
The hydra-headed military-intelligence apparatus, which soaks up enormous sums of money and employs enormous numbers of people in the US, the UK and elsewhere, has not emerged primarily to confront the danger represented by a few thousand Islamist fanatics. The terrorist threat from that region exists in the first place because the great powers have been plundering the resources of the Middle East, propping up hated, brutal dictators there and supporting repression of the Palestinian people for more than half a century.
The present social order, with its gaping social inequality, is incompatible with the old democratic norms. London is home to financial criminals in large numbers, while conditions for masses of people, especially young ones, worsen unrelentingly. The cameras and police and spies and military have arrived on the scene for that reason, to deal with the coming social explosion.
This is not something within the thinking of many artists at present. The drama here unfolds almost entirely apart from British conditions and British life, it doesn’t point toward them, it remains the province of two high-minded, isolated Good Samaritans—and that weakens the proceedings and their emotional impact.
In any event, artistically incomplete though it may be, Closed Circuit is a chilling, disturbing film. Its weaknesses have no doubt helped generate the generally lukewarm or negative reviews in the American media, but it is also a movie that makes the critics nervous, because it comes too close to what everyone knows is home. Broadbent, as the attorney general, gets to deliver one of the strongest lines in the film, whose implications Closed Circuit only hints at, when he tells Bana’s Rose: “There are powers at play that neither you nor I may even hope to control.”
You can read the full review here.
(*ADDED NOTE: There's a review in the New York Times by the unimpressive Manohla Dargis, whose lacklustre writing used to "grace" the LA Weekly. Don't waste your time reading it; she ignores the political significance of the movie, and hides behind a chuckling front of "oh-what-fun-to-be-so-paranoid-in-a-movie". Come to think of it, maybe that is how the NYT would react to a foreign Government murdering one of their own.)
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