Guy Ritchie's The Covenant

The Weight of Silence

I didn't think Guy Ritchie had this kind of film in him. For 25 years, the British director has made a name for kinetic energy—gangsters, fast talk, and quick cuts. So when I sat down for *Guy Ritchie's The Covenant* (the possessive title feels defensive), I expected his usual flashy style. Instead, the screen opened on a dusty, sun-bleached Afghanistan in 2018. The camera's steady. The tone is surprisingly serious. Ritchie strips away his usual tricks to look straight at a distinctly American failure: the thousands of local interpreters abandoned to the Taliban after the messy 2021 military pullout.



The film revolves around a huge, brutal middle section that I'm still processing. After a routine raid on an IED factory goes terribly wrong, U.S. Army Sergeant John Kinley (Jake Gyllenhaal) is badly hurt and completely reliant on his Afghan interpreter, Ahmed (Dar Salim). What follows is a grueling trek across miles of harsh mountain terrain. Ritchie films this not as a heroic action scene, but as a slow, drawn-out torment. The camera stays on the wooden cart Ahmed builds to drag Kinley's dead weight. We see the strain in Salim's neck muscles, the sweat caked into the dust on his face, the mechanical repetition of one heavy step after another. There's almost no dialogue. Just the crunch of gravel and the shallow, ragged breaths of two men clinging to life.



It's completely Salim’s movie. The Danish-Iraqi actor has shown up in bit parts in projects like *Game of Thrones* for years, but here he owns every frame. He plays Ahmed not as a subservient helper, but as a man vibrating with quiet power. It's all in his heavy-lidded eyes and stiff posture; he watches the American soldiers with a calculating intelligence that's almost contemptuous, until he decides to save one of them. Gyllenhaal, meanwhile, gives two distinct performances. In the mountains, he's a broken, unconscious slab of meat. But back in California, safe in his suburban kitchen, his face slowly sags into pure mental anguish. He’s a man crushed by a debt he can’t repay.



I'm not totally sure the film's last third works as well as its brutal middle. When Kinley decides to go back to Afghanistan to rescue Ahmed's family, Ritchie sometimes falls back into typical action-movie rhythms, with shootouts that feel a bit too polished. But even then, the emotional core hums underneath. As Witney Seibold pointed out on KCRW, the film’s most honest moments are actually just Gyllenhaal "experiencing the wrath of the U.S. immigration system" over the phone, stuck in an endless loop of automated bureaucracy while the man who saved him is being hunted. That frustration is the real hook of the movie. It’s an exhausting, intense look at the agony of owing your life to someone else, and the horrible realization that the institutions we trust don't care about our promises.