Breaking

Breaking (2022) is a taut drama you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Abi Damaris Corbin and starring John Boyega. It is drawn from an actual 2017 incident: Marine veteran Brian Brown-Easley walked into a suburban Atlanta bank branch carrying a weapon — not to rob it, but to be heard.

The Veterans Affairs department had denied his disability claim. His benefits were frozen. He was out of moves. Inside the bank, a negotiator played by Michael Kenneth Williams is brought in to talk him out — two men circling each other while the clock runs and the institutions that were supposed to help Brown-Easley remain absent. Connie Britton and Nicole Beharie round out a cast that keeps the film grounded in the specific rather than the symbolic.

Boyega does something difficult here: he makes a man in an impossible situation feel neither heroic nor pathetic, just real. The film sits closer to a character study than a thriller, which is exactly what makes it uncomfortable to watch. Stream Breaking (2022) online on iFILM.