THEOPHILOS PAPASTYLIANOS
HE WHO IS
NOT WITH
ME
IS
AGAINST
ME
SYNOPSIS
"He who is not with me is against me." It is the one and only distinction the Regime accepts and the sole philosophy of the Special Service, whose sole raison d'être is to defend the system.
People are not divided into good and bad, Left or Right, law-abiding and out-laws. The Regime itself is the dividing line.
A man is arrested and immediately finds himself at the Special Service. He has never attracted any attention, not a single thing against him. His act all innocent!
The Head of Section decides to put the Plan into action. The goal: to prove the Suspect is guilty. It is a simple plan. So flawless, it may have been conceived by a computer, so subtle that it works upon its victims without revealing its intent.
Two agents -an Interrogator and a Manager- will work on the Plan together. They will travel by car and escort the Suspect to the Centre, an off the grid facility in the middle of nowhere.
THE FLAW
A game of psychological manipulation comes into place and an act of ‘playing human’ on the Suspect with the Interrogator holding the leading role; an act where reality becomes twisted and each detail, every snatch of conversation, or piece of action, takes on a new significance.
Step by step the Plan unfolds and moves forward. Everything seems to work like clockwork and all the pieces fall into place.
But just as the puzzle seems complete, something unexpected happens.
There’s a Flaw. It is the Plan's failure to allow for the human factor.
Interrogator and Suspect enter a new world. A fellow feeling comes to light and their beliefs begin to crumble.
Is a single grain of humanity enough to short-circuit the Plan and bring the Regime’s machinery crashing down?
Is that all it takes to erase the dividing line and allow the two men to see what unites them and not what tears them apart?
DIRE
CTOR'S
SCRIPT
WRITER'S
NOTE
How free are we? Do we control the way we think and act, how we perceive reality and people around us? Can we find what unites us, not what tears us apart? With 1/3 of the world’s population living in a back slide democracy, is authoritarianism knocking at our back door? Can oppression take the form of a peaceful society?
The first time I read The Flaw, I was a teenager. It was a classic, translated in 33 languages. The second was during a trip at Brighton, the English translation lying on a bookstore café. All these questions about freedom, identity and human diversity came tumbling down and one book phrase got stuck in my mind: “He who is not with me is against me”.
The Flaw is a neo-noir psychological thriller but also an allegory and a political parable. It offers a timeless warning of totalitarian Regimes but also of every form of power, how it assumes to control and shape us. Look at the Ukrainian invasion, the rise of nationalism, the new Cold war moving in our lives.
Oppression doesn’t always go hand in hand with armed forces and curfews. It can take the form of a prosperous society; where the setting seems friendly but propaganda and tools of control are more sophisticated.
The Regime is not just a totalitarian state. It represents the rigidity of thought, the lack of connection and the bias against things; all found in another person, a family, an organization or society as a whole.
Think of a man hunting in the woods. He sees a deer, lifts his riffle and takes aim. Now the deer has become something completely different; what he sees through his scope is a prey. The same principle applies to us all. If we could just take a step back, we would be able to see the man behind the scope.
The reality described is neither time nor place specific. We’re in Godard’s Alphaville present-future; time has come to a halt making it impossible to remember when the Regime was set in motion or even when it will end. It’s a dystopian Orwellian world where life is enclosed in a box; all is directed and monitored with the Big Brother ready to ‘punish’ whoever falls out of place.
The Flaw talks about betrayal; adulthood betrays childhood, war betrays peace, power betrays freedom, prejudice betrays diversity. It’s a story about transformation and doing what’s right. At times being different, becoming "the flaw" at an airtight and rigid system is the right thing.
Odyssey like the trip is the message. The Interrogator is led to a new affirmation of human values while the Suspect discovers the person behind the predator. Eventually the identities of both men merge into one.
In the end, it doesn’t matter if the Suspect is guilty or not, if he escapes or the Interrogator breaks him. What matters the most is the battle people give to meet with each other, to find out what unites them, not what tears them apart.
