Early on in the suicide-bomber analysis The War Within, it looks like director Joseph Castelo and co-writer/star Ayad Akhtar are up to something high-concept and contrived. In the film's opening scenes, Akhtar, a Pakistan-born student, is kidnapped off the streets of Paris and flown to a dank prison where he's viciously tortured and questioned about terrorist activity. Three years later, he arrives in New York City a harder, more somber man, ready to join a terrorist cell and carry a bomb into Grand Central Station. For a while, the two timelines play out in parallel, with scenes of Akhtar preparing for the attacks alternating with horrific sequences from his interrogations. Clearly, one event informs the other—Akhtar's prison cellmate Charles Daniel Sandoval becomes his terrorist cell leader, for instance—and it seems Castelo and Akhtar are working toward an ironic and tragic cause-and-effect chain, whereby brutality turns Akhtar into the brute his captors think he is, and immoderate repression of terrorists simply creates more of them.
