Passionately conceived and written with quietly denunciatory conviction, Storm represents one of the only film attempts of the last decade and a half to even try and deal with the aftermath of the barbaric atrocities of the Bosnian war, and as such deserves more viewings than its meager distribution will likely provide. But a directing style so sober it borders on the nonexistent and a too-obvious story cripples this effort right from the get-go.

Essentially the story of two tough women fighting for a scrap of dignity in a world of men who don’t seem to know the meaning of the word, Storm starts off with Hannah Maynard (Kerry Fox), a prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal at the Hague, getting tossed onto the trial of Goran Duric, a Yugoslavian general (Drazen Kuhn) accused of massacring Bosnian Muslim civilians. It looks like an easy one, but in short order the defense punches holes through the testimony of her jumpy star witness and Duric is just about on the verge of walking free. The only way for Maynard to keep her case together is to try and coax a Bosnian woman who might have witnessed the same atrocities before fleeing to Germany, Mira Arendt (the stellar Anamaria Marinca, of 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days), into testifying. It’s at about that time that nationalist thugs start coming out of the woodwork with brazen threats, and European Union bureaucrats start looking for damage-control deals to cut -- the truth of the massacre, and any collateral damage to Maynard’s threatened witnesses, be damned.

As political-legal thrillers go, this one is something of a non-starter. Director and co-writer Hans-Christian Schmid was clearly inspired by the dogged (and frequently ignored) work of the Hague’s prosecutors who keep fighting to bring these war criminals to justice long after the rest of the world has stopped bothered caring. The film’s grey-dishwater palette and workaday calm perfectly mirrors the grindingly slow machinations that typify these kind of legal proceedings. Schmid’s clever casting of Fox typifies his pragmatic approach, presenting a smart, tough, and completely unglamorous professional woman in sensible suits as his hero. In a role that could easily have devolved into showy histrionics, Arendt also brings a mostly dry-eyed but deeply wounded sensibility to her soulful performance.

But while the pieces of the plot click together with a keen precision, the whole effect is more than a little washed-out. It’s not just Schmid’s refusal to go the low road of noir-ish lighting and slow-motion flashbacks to juice the audiences’ fear and sympathy responses that causes the problem. In fact, Storm is particularly refreshing in how resolutely it keeps from stooping to old and tired tactics (no sinister men lurking in dark alleyways to menace the female protagonists). The problem lies in a script that rarely states a point that it doesn’t want to bang home in the most obvious manner possible. This tendency becomes particularly acute in the film’s potentially most fascinating section, when an increasingly infuriated Maynard tangles with a dead-hearted bureaucracy more interested in expediency than justice.

As a war crimes procedural for the modern age, Storm makes for an occasionally insightful look into the day-to-day reality of how this kind of justice works, in an office-park sterile setting and with a resolution fated to come about only long after the powers that be have long past shifted their attention to new crises and crimes. The portrait may be accurate but Schmid’s overly muted take on the story hardly does justice to the stark terror and injustice that lies at its core.

Aka Sturm.



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