The Defectors

In a near future, police state Britain, the leader of a rebel group is gunned down on a stage that he was never supposed to have been on, as a member of the ruling authority tries to play both sides in an effort to bring back everything the UK has lost along the way.

In 2028 the Prime Minister was assassinated and a new power seized control for what was supposed to be only a temporary period. By 2032, The Interim Authority still has a stranglehold on the power in the country and has created a surveillance state where everybody’s movements are monitored and everyone’s details are registered in order to control them. Casey Rock (Vatikiotis), the leader of a rebel group, has managed to infiltrate an IA conference and has got himself on stage to deliver a message to the people, helped there by double agent, Detective Reed Stanford (Hristov), but before he can get his first sentence out, he’s blasted through the head and falls down dead on the stage.

Detective Reed rushes to help, oblivious to who might be watching, and is helped out of the building by shady agents of no description. What follows is an unfolding of events, where we are caught up in flashbacks, while Detective Reed tries to keep playing his hand as a member of the IA and the rebel group simultaneously. Alongside him on either side are his wife and fellow rebel, Maddie (Upton), and his new boss, Detective Monk (Kirk), who both need Reed to keep doing what he’s doing as long as they each believe that he’s on their side.

Sold as a Children Of Men (2006) style look into the future of Britain, where the police state runs everyone’s lives and home-grown terrorism lurks on every corner, The Defectors rushes us straight into the action with very little setup, throwing characters and scenarios at us that we have no clue about until we are caught up in the round. Very quickly we have to deal with people shouting in rooms at each other in one scene, and quiet conversations of subterfuge and revolution in another, while everybody moons around in black and grey without necessarily giving up just which side they are on.

There is quite a bit of to-ing and fro-ing in the script, as Detective Reed switches between sides, trying to play all angles, and we are thrown around from past to present as we are furnished with the details that we never got in the beginning, through flashbacks that try to tell us which side Reed is really on. It can be quite tricky to keep up with what’s going on in The Defectors, as people can look pretty similar in their black and grey, with their ratty facial hair and turned up collars, standing in the shadows, and the dialogue doesn’t help us any as it rattles through its exposition from a writer’s standpoint, telling us its facts as though we have already lived the past four years with these people.

In the space of twenty-minutes we should really be able to get a good handle on our characters and scenarios, if they were introduced and handled properly, but here we are faced with stylised cinematography and bad synth chords instead, as a crutch to expose the near-futurism of the piece, without really focusing on the main things that any good story needs. In the end The Defectors gets caught up in itself and its character play, twisting threads around each other in ways that don’t feed the main idea or the over-arching scenario, but instead keeping the pieces moving around the board until they are so far up each other’s backside that it’s hard to tell them apart.

It’s also hard to tell what the point of The Defectors really is, when it jettisons the overall narrative to instead focus on the Internal Affairs of a few bent coppers and a tiny home-cell of supposed rebels. There’s no real commentary on the state of the country as it is today, and no real warning of where we could be heading if we don’t fix the unnamed things that are broken. Without taking a standpoint against anything in particular, The Defectors just becomes a play about people in a future that doesn’t exist, talking about things that don’t affect us. Their machinations are entirely self-ingratiating and only look inward at the characters rather than expositioning a world that we could believe in, and with that it leaves itself more as a poor man’s Line Of Duty (which is poor enough itself in the first place) than any sort of revolutionary statement on life in the UK.