Movie Review: 'Detroit' – tale of racial hatred echoes through the ages

You need look no further than the recent events in Charlottesville to understand that however distasteful you may find images on screen of violence against black bodies, this is still unfortunately and undeniably a reality of the world in which we live.

Kathryn Bigelow's Detroit makes this point in an uncompromisingly uncomfortable fashion in order to remind viewers that the truth of history is sometimes the best fuel for the changing of attitudes in the present, but only if we face that truth in all its harrowing brutality.

Set during the riots that tore apart the predominantly black neighbourhoods of the US city in the summer of 1967, Bigelow and writing collaborator Mark Boal use historical documents and accounts to tell a story whose focus is not on the riots themselves but on one chilling incident that occurred at the Algiers Motel, in which three young black men were killed by white policemen given unfettered powers in the arrogant defence of their race.

Using the hand-held camera techniques which she and cinematographer Barry Ackroyd honed to great effect in The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, Bigelow drops her audience into the action without much exposition before arriving at the chamber piece which forms one of the most excruciating hours of raw violence in recent cinematic memory.

WATCH the trailer for Detroit

The terrible humiliation that is wrought on the bodies of the black men and two white women who find themselves at the mercy of their white police tormentors is difficult to stomach, but it is necessary as a visceral and all too familiar reminder of the dangers of unbridled and state-sanctioned white power.

These men - young, strong, with their lives still ahead of them - are reduced to victims not by virtue of any lack in their own characters but rather by the limits imposed upon them by a racial system that refuses to recognise them as human. You may never want to watch this film again but you should brace yourself to endure its violence once for the simple reason that its message is loud and clear: some things never change.

Whether it's the image of black bodies swinging like strange fruit in the poplar trees in the 1920s, or thick-necked white men chanting hate speech against Jews 70 years after the end of the Holocaust, or women being smacked around like ping pong balls by men in positions of power, sanctioned violence against the powerless remains a constant presence in societies from Virginia to Gauteng.

The policemen charged with the murders at the Algiers Motel - like those charged more recently in the US in various cases of brutality - were exonerated by the courts for their bravery in defending their communities against out of control black men hellbent on biting the hands that fed them.

Bigelow's film is a terrifying look into a series of mirrors that reflect the same, depressing, depleting but difficult to erase reality of a system in which black lives still don't matter to white men with guns.

WHAT OTHERS SAY

• A gruelling, nightmarish, ferociously vivid riot epic that recreates one of the darkest chapters in American history. Unflinching, unmissable. - Simon Crook, Empire

• Sordid and sadistic, it's filled with so much excessive violence that it induces revulsion, emerging as exploitative, racial torture pornography. - Susan Granger, SSG Syndicate

• This is no comforting drama of social protest. It's closer to a hair-trigger historical nightmare, one you can't tear yourself away from. - Owen Gleiberman, Variety

• This article was originally published in The Times.