Conditioned Response
2017 · 7m
Directed by Craig Atkinson, Laura Hartrick
Genres: crime, documentary
Tones: contemplative, dark, provocative
Content Warning: This film contains recordings of violence being committed by police officers. For the past 20 years, ex-Army Ranger and “killology” expert Dave Grossman has been traveling across the US to train police officers on his philosophy of killing.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Most docs genuflect at the altar of their subject or neatly condemn it—Atkinson and Hartrick do neither, letting Grossman's own words and the training footage sit in the room like an unexploded device, which is infinitely more unsettling than any narrator's moral hand-holding could be.
The film's restraint in the face of inflammatory material—its refusal to editorialise through score or reaction shots—places it in a lineage of rigorous observational documentary that trusts formal discipline over rhetorical force, though this may frustrate those seeking clearer structural argument.
The decision to let raw training footage breathe without intercutting talking heads or archival chaos creates an almost unbearable proximity to the subject; it's a formal choice that costs nothing but attention, and it's what makes seven minutes feel like a reckoning.