What happens when the person who is supposed to help you overcome your vulnerability exploits that vulnerability instead? That is the question posed by the action thriller Indemnity set in South Africa, that country’s contender for best Non-English Language Film.
Told mostly in Afrikaans, with some English, the film features Africa Movie Academy Award winner Jarrid Geduld (10,000 BC and Ellen: Die Storie van Ellen Pakkies) as Theo, a former firefighter who is suffering from PTSD after a rescue goes wrong.
Struggling to cope with the emotional fallout of that event, using alcohol as a panacea, he’s resistant to psychological counseling although it’s a condition of getting his job back. Life becomes more complicated when he wakes next to his investigative-journalist wife (Nicole Fortuin) to discover her dead, with him as the prime suspect.
Written and directed by Travis Taute, Indemnity delivers a Hollywood-style action film, with intricate fight sequences that provide fresh takes on hand-to-hand combat that call to mind genre films like The Bourne Identity and ‘man-on-the-run’ movies like The Fugitive.
For good measure, Taute peppers the script with the crippling effects of toxic masculinity that expects men to absorb trauma with stoic nonchalance.
With escalating pressure, Theo struggles to evade capture, prove his innocence, and uncover a sinister plot that pulls in the very people he counts on, in an ever-changing dynamic.
Cape Town serves as the backdrop. Indemnity is available on VOD.