Premiere of the South African film «Indemnity»
A Cape Town Film Shoot
This South African thriller trades plausibility and originality for a worthy substitute: plenty of fun. We at KapWeine are delighted by the international breakthrough of this film and raise a toast to it!
Haunted by the ghosts of many past Hollywood blockbusters, the South African thriller «Indemnity» trades plausibility and originality for a worthy substitute: plenty of fun.
In Travis Taute's feature film debut, a brooding firefighter with PTSD (reminiscent of countless troubled action heroes) is accused of his wife's murder (à la "The Fugitive") and goes on the run to uncover a complex techno-political conspiracy (with clear parallels to «The Manchurian Candidate»).
The script is a patchwork of tropes, but Travis Taute's eye for elegant, surprising action sequences and the charisma of the main actors make this film an extremely entertaining experience.
Jarrid Geduld plays Theo Abrams, a local fire department star who takes a leave of absence for health reasons after witnessing two colleagues die in a fire they were fighting. One morning, he wakes up to find his wife Angela (Nicole Fortuin), an investigative journalist, strangled – just hours after she received a report about a sinister government conspiracy. As Theo has recently been prone to drinking binges and manic outbursts, the authorities consider him the prime suspect in her death. So he zigzags his way through Cape Town, escaping both the police and some mysterious bald villains.
Taute overloads «Indemnity» with subplots about police corruption, Theo's past traumas, and pan-African deep-state intrigues. But there's a lovable sincerity in the film's dedication to all this elaborate narrative scaffolding (including some fascinating real-world commentary on South African racial politics) for what is essentially a series of «Mission Impossible»-style escapades. Taute designs clever spatial set pieces – playing with the architectural possibilities of elevators, skyscrapers, and a labyrinthine chemical factory – while Geduld, who largely performs his own stunts, displays a gritty physicality that is rare in today's plastic, CGI-driven action world.
