Hailing from a small town in Florida, wide-eyed Army Private Amy Cole (Kristen Stewart) comes to the detention center at Guantanamo Bay eager to prove herself. She is ushered into a grim world of strict routine. Most of her time is devoted to moving in a small circle, pausing to glance through each cell door every few minutes to ensure the detainees—not "prisoners," her superiors insist—are not harming themselves or otherwise causing trouble. The severity and moral uncertainty begins to weigh on Amy, particularly after she befriends charismatic eight-year inmate Ali (Payman Maadi), an avid reader whose exact reason for detention and level of quote-unquote guilt is left ambiguous. When they first meet, he begs her for the seventh and final Harry Potter novel. The camp library only has the first six, and he is desperate to learn how the story ends.

Camp X-Ray is a heavy, topical, and well-intentioned film. It has two central concerns. First and foremost: the ethical opacity of a place such as Guantanamo Bay and its dehumanizing power on both the inmates and the soldier-guards. Second: the strife of female members of the armed forces. The second is more powerful. It is both involving and frightening to see Amy try to fit into the largely masculine tapestry of life at Guantanamo and how she reacts to, among other wrongs, sexual objectification and condescension. Kristen Stewart, a much-maligned performer I have always enjoyed, delivers a strong performance. Without overplaying any note, she conveys her character's growing spiritual turmoil. Overtly explanatory lines such as, "It's not as black and white as they said it was going to be" are present, but not required because her eyes and gestures tell the story.

Unfortunately, the film falters as a platonic-relationship drama and as an indictment of Guantanamo Bay, though there are a few hard-to-watch images, including a forced feeding via the nostrils. Despite fine acting by Stewart and the magnetic Maadi, known best for playing the lead role in the Iranian hit A Separation, their characters' burgeoning bond never rings entirely true. After the first act does so much to establish how constrictive and regulated the detention camp is, later scenes in which the duo have lengthy philosophical conversations through the night register as artificial and unconvincing. How is this allowed? Is no one else seeing this on a surveillance camera? These scenes also tend to run long, extending what should be a 90- or 100-minute film to two hours, and have the claustrophobic quality of a filmed stage play. A loquacious and heavy-handed nadir is a monologue in which Amy describes going to a zoo as a child and wondering if the animals could ever go free after so long in captivity. Thud. Gong. Long sigh. Give credit to Stewart, though. She is splendid here and tries her hardest to sell even this low point of a scene.

B-

I actually found the scenes you had a problem with to be really engaging. Especially their final scene together.

It's not great but I found it to be a solid film and Stewart was great in it.

7/10 (B-)