IF YOU are going to stick it to the Americans for their human rights record over Guantanamo, do it on their terms. That's the ethos of unpredictable British director Michael Winterbottom, and his film rages like a noisy bullhorn. The lighting is harsh and glaring, the soundtrack shrill, thrumming with helicopters, exploding weapons, and barking dogs and soldiers. Watching it is like having your senses sandpapered for 95 minutes. The cumulative effect is unease - similar to a long interrogation with hard light in your eyes. Which is just the point.

It concerns the Tipton Three, a bunch of British teenagers who were rounded up in Afghanistan after the US invasion and shipped out to Guantanamo for two years' imprisonment as high-level terrorists.

Two years later, they were released without charge. They claimed they were in Pakistan for a wedding, only going into nextdoor Afghanistan for a look-see and "to help." Certainly the film depicts them as naïve travellers, the kind who are oblivious to the dangers of entering a country about to be upended by the US war machine.

It's shot like a made-for-television dramatic reconstruction.

Interviews with the real Tipton Three are spliced in and it occasionally shows flashbacks to happier times for the boys.

Afghanistan is chaotic and disorganised. The boys don't speak the language. When the US invasion begins they look like they are caught in their own bad movie. One becomes ill, and bombing rips up the night sky, but they can't get back to Pakistan because every truck leads to the front line. They are caught by the Northern Alliance and stuffed like sardines into the back of a truck with other Taliban fighters. A soldier sprays bullet air holes into the stifling metal container.

At the notorious Sheberghan prison, the US soldiers open it to find many Taliban dead inside.

Keen to sort out "the really bad guys, " however, US soldiers sift out the al-Qaeda suspects and ship them to Camp X-ray in Guantanamo in Cuba. There they keep them in cagelike cells and force them to wear orange jump suits, ear plugs and blind goggles. They are put into stress positions and shut in a dark room where death metal music is blasted at them full volume.

More absurd though are the interrogations, which provide moments of sharp relief. "I want to know where bin Laden is, " an interrogator calmly says. "I don't know, " the boy from Tipton responds.

Meanwhile, they are accused of attending at an al-Qaeda rally in Pakistan in 2000. But two of them were on parole in England. The other was working in Currys.

Winterbottom and co-director Mat Whitecross shot the film in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Britain and Iran on a budget of just over $2m. The locations lend the film a sheen of authenticity, but it never amounts to anything more than an elaborate reconstruction.