WHEN A GOOD storyteller has the skill to worm their way into an established monolith of history, there’s always some meat for a fantastic story. But Ian Gabriel’s Death of a Whistleblower is a lot more than just a great yarn that cuts deliciously close to the bone for South African viewers. It’s an exceptionally strong film, and it’s reason enough to scatter your other plans for the evening of 28 February 2024, when it screens at Theatre on the Square in Sandton, part of the Johannesburg Film Festival.

From the get-go, you are sucked into a story replete with brilliant and completely unpredictable hairpin bends, credible characters and a flashback of some 37 years into the dark heart of genocidal thought and ghastly social experiments, during apartheid. It’s a tale filled with the prime devils that populated the chemical side of apartheid thinking, of the ilk of Wouter Basson aka Dr Death (Charlie Bouguenon) but also post-apartheid’s demons, who are profiting from the detritus of that very same thinking, but now behind carefully shut doors. And in the role of Thula Siya, one of the lynchpins high up on the military scaffolding, S’Thandiwe Kgoroge shines magnificently and flawlessly with sheer evil, from her eyebrows and hairstyle, to her persona and costumes.

But the story’s primarily in the hands of Luyanda Masinda (Noxolo Dlamini), a bright young journalist with her eye on the moral ball, to the complex concern of her editor Harmon (Clyde Berning). With a fantastic wardrobe that supersedes the bounds of realism, she’s good on the eye and the heart as she takes the moral line to its gory closure, which revisits old hippies and their painful wounds and cynicism, of the ilk of Jonathan Pienaar and Andre Odendaal.

It’s a film crafted around the memory of those real whistleblowers who have been casualties at the hands of the powers that be, but it doesn’t crassly step on their stories. This work is fictional, but made with a mission to expose those kinds of stories that are quashed into silence, because the truth is too dangerous. It’s a work which gives Rob van Vuuren in the cameo role of Stanley Galloway, a tautness of focus and a precis-short moment to yield a fully fleshed individual, which he does with authority, but also one that presents Inez Robertson as the flame that runs through this work. Indeed, this whole film is clustered with cameo-gems that keep the texture of the work interesting as it enables performers to shine for a moment and haunt the narrative with that tiny window of their character, thereafter.

Ultimately, it’s a very satisfying and completely engaging film, which covers the usual tropes of a thriller of this nature, with a dash of South African verve, elegant and strong filmography and a cohesion that never feels forced. In short, it’s an important film. A must see, where the identities of crooks and good guys are no longer clear, and the psychopathy of the little boy who saw too much cannot be undermined. It’s something to touch your inner sense of what really matters in this country.

• Death of a Whistleblower is written by Ian Gabriel with Kelly Eve Koopman and Phillip Roberts; its screenplay is written by Marius Scholtz and Louis Viljoen. It is produced by Ian Gabriel and Tshepiso Chikapa Phiri and features creative input by Markus Wormstorm (music); Devin Toselli (cinematography); Eva du Preez (editing); Bonnie Lee Bouman (casting); Chantel Carter (production design); and Lehasa Mollovi (costumes). Performed by Irshaad Ally, Clyde Berning, Charlie Bouguenon, Deon Coetzee, Noxolo Dlamini, S’Thandiwe Kgoroge, Andre Odendaal, Anthony Oseyemi, Jonathan Pienaar, Inez Robertson, Maxime Scheepers, Kathleen Stephens and Rob van Vuuren, it features on this year’s Johannesburg Film Festival and launches on Amazon Prime on 28 February 2024.