The Kill Team Explores the Tension in Wartime Morality

The Maywand District murders during the War in Afghanistan are not exactly the easiest story to adapt to film. It was an uncomfortable and messy ordeal that led to a damning trial with harsh punishments, less so for those that came forward. The 2013 documentary The Kill Team took aim at the legal trials, with soldiers and their families relaying their experience before and after the trial. The 2019 docudrama with the same title shifts targets to the emotional intensity of being locked within the violent corruption of a squad gone wrong.

From the first scene, we watch morality die on the battlefield. US private Andrew Briggman (Nat Wolff) is doing a check of citizens in an Afghan village, and the soldiers go about their duties with smirks and calmness, even when one villager grows hostile. The sergeant in charge disciplines his men to show friendliness when it comes to civilians. That sergeant is soon replaced, however, by Sergeant Deeks (Alexander Skarsgård), a leader who is seemingly playful in how he favors his squad partaking in weed and having contests of strength. But when it comes to war, he tosses out the rule book. Hostage-taking and murder of villagers become a common and hideous invigorating practice for the cocky squad.

Nat Wolff as Andrew Briggman and Alexander Skarsgård Sergeant Deeks in The Kill Team (2019). Courtesy of A24

Briggman is shaken, but what can he do? The rest of his squad seems to be into the senseless violence. Deeks doesn’t ask them to treat the civilians with respect and encourages more freedom within their means of fun and justice; the soldiers do not question their sergeant because he’s convinced them it’s not worth playing by the rules if your own men are dying. Briggman expresses this hatred early on and comes to regret it when Deeks takes to bringing action to emotional words. From the moment he gives Briggman the opportunity to torture a prisoner, they know where they stand, and an internal battle is on to see whether Briggman will fall in line or posses enough morality to require it to be beaten out of him.

The film keeps us entirely within Briggman’s mind. We can feel the sweat rolling off him as he tries to secretly contact his father about the corruption while trying to hide it from his comrades. We see him ponder desperate actions, sometimes visually laying out what would happen if he were found out or if he killed himself rather than kept going on. There’s a very tense and heartbreaking moment when he is ordered to kill a civilian or face the unspoken punishment of being slaughtered for not going forward. We hope he’ll disobey and prevent the death of an innocent. But can he? He is trapped and only has a brief moment during gunfire to scream out in rage. After all, Deeks demands his men keep their emotions, which would only make them soft in combat, out of their work.

The Kill Team was directed by Dan Krauss, who directed the documentary of the same name on the same subject. He keeps a sharp focus on Briggman so that we feel as desperate as he is and ask the tough questions about his situation. Do we follow orders and kill villagers in the name of finding landmines or do we disobey and face punishment or a covered-up death? Do we take the risk of telling someone higher or do we keep our heads down? The film offers no easy answers, only showcasing how much regret and emotional turmoil comes with continuing the charade of a just and tough unit. There’s at least a contentment in the end, as the casual killers during times of war mutate into desperate messes when their actions are revealed and come into question. Briggman can only stare blankly at the face of evil the same way it stared back at him. And we’re left with a tougher question: how do you explain your actions? Just as there are no easy answers, there are rarely easy scenes within The Kill Team.

Courtesy of A24