Undocumented | On Demand review

Tackling illegal immigration and xenophobia, Chris Peckover’s well-intentioned torture-porn cheapie Undocumented provides a counterbalance to more sober-minded and pious recent efforts like Sin Nombre and A Better Life. A cast of youthful bait—graduate film students making a documentary on border crossings, led by aspiring filmmaker Travis (Scott Mechlowicz)—winds up in the clutches of psychotic minutemen. Masked leader Z (Peter Stormare) offers to set the white Americans free after they film his group’s ritual torture and humiliation of naked, chained migrants.

Any serious points about migrant labor, border security or amnesty for longtime aliens fail to come across, allegorically or otherwise. Late in the game, nascent producer Liz (Alona Tal) accuses her captors of claiming to be patriots as an excuse for exercising their sadism on undocumented non-entities without protection—which is absolutely true. The film attendantly takes in long, nasty sequences: an endless woman-on-the-rock set piece is later topped by the combination of a human-stuffed piñata and a spiked baseball bat.

Conflating someone’s political views, no matter how extreme, with fascistic vigilantism isn’t much of an argument. It doesn’t help that the film seems to be getting off on the violence, gorehound-style. (Now available on VOD; see ifcfilms.com for details.)