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FACING THE ENEMY: A U.S. soldier stands guard over hooded captives at Guantánamo.

Mat Whitecross and Michael Winterbottom's (interview) film tells its story via news archives, political pronouncements and, primarily, interviews with the Tipton Three. Traveling through Kunduz, Afghanistan, in late 2001, this trio of British Muslims, all in their early 20s, were detained and held at various facilities for over two years. At the end of their ordeal, they were released without charge. The movie illustrates their stories with re-enactments, surreal in a way that recalls America's Most Wanted, artfully integrating memory and immediacy.

Asif Iqbal (played in the flashback scenes by Arfan Usman) sets up the situation. Living in England, he submits to his mother's desire that he go to Pakistan, where his father lives, in order to undertake an arranged marriage. He brings along his friends Ruhal Ahmed (Farhad Harun) and Shafiq Rasul (Riz Ahmed), and once in the Middle East, they are joined by Monir (Waqar Siddiqui) and Shafiq's cousin Zahid (Shahid Iqbal). Though it's October 2001 and the U.S. is responding aggressively to 9/11, these young men head off on diversions without imagining the potential consequences. And so, they end up in Afghanistan as the bombing starts.

The film's digital video aesthetics—dim night scenes, hand-held camerawork, scratchy captions to mark dates and places—recall Winterbottom's In This World, a docudrama about an Afghan refugee seeking work in Britain. But the tone also brings to mind his science-fiction essay, Code 46, in the sense that the government's utter inflexibility makes the situation seem quite incomprehensible. ("Have you seen Back to the Future?" the present-time Asif asks at one point, grasping at wild fictions to describe the reality.) The approximation of the past works with varying success. The prisoners have no proof of their experience save for what they know. The U.S. has released no records or other information to confirm their stories. Interrogations and treatment at the camps are designed to fragment experience, dislocate identities and press for "truth" in the face of canny deceptions.

When they are first picked up in Kunduz, "the middle of nowhere," the men lose track of their friend Monir (a closing epigraph states that his fate remains unknown). Briefly interned at the Sheberghan Prison, the three are handed over to the Americans when their captors hear them speak English. From here they are moved to Kandahar Airbase, then—newly clothed in orange jumpsuits—Camp X-Ray, and at last Camp Delta (a "purpose-built facility," as opposed to X-Ray's outdoor cages). "You are now the property of the U.S. Marine Corps," they hear on their arrival in Cuba. Indeed: They're treated like animals and worse, a means of developing "intel."

The Americans' tactics include stress positions, loud metal music and strobe lights, bags over prisoners' heads, barking and biting dogs, runs around the yard while crouched over, porn magazines shoved in prisoners' faces and months in solitary confinement. Repeatedly interrogated by characters who seem to have stepped out of a Steven Seagal movie ("I'm from Washington!" announces one cool blond woman), the prisoners have no answers, and some eventually stop talking altogether, frustrated that it doesn't matter what they say. "Do you drink water?" they are asked. "Are you the fucking British traitor?" "Have you met Osama bin Laden?" Again and again, prisoners are told they are al-Qaida, that their religion makes them suspects, that they attended a 2000 rally where bin Laden spoke. The British government offers no help and the men have no access to their families or lawyers.

Given the June 28 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court against the Bush administration's use of military tribunals to obscure its treatment of prisoners at facilities like Guantánamo, Road seems even more pressing than it did just a week ago. The movie makes a convincing case that a stay at Guantánamo brings on severe, even suicidal, depression. And all of it gives the lie to the spin recently applied to the three suicides at the camp, that they were a "PR stunt" or an "act of war."

The depiction of such appalling conditions—punctuated by Donald Rumsfeld's assertion that conditions in the camps are "consistent with the Geneva Convention, for the most part"—suggests a couple of things. One, the prohibition of substantive press coverage at Guantánamo and other facilities means no one is accountable. This needs to change. And two, definitions of "bad" and "good" need to be reconsidered. Or maybe just considered in the first place.