Uwe Boll has made some bad films. He has made some offensive films. But with ‘Citizen Vigilante’, the German director has made something categorically different: a piece of far-right agitprop that functions less as cinema and more as a recruitment video for the far-right, lone-wolf terrorist tradition.

The film was controversial from the start, and Germany moved to effectively ban it on the grounds that it may violate hate speech law and incite violence.

The row intensified when Elon Musk broadcast the full film to his 240 million followers on X, turbocharging its reach among precisely the audience it was made for. It currently holds a 95% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes; its admirers leaving reviews that praise not its filmmaking but its messaging.

Boll, meanwhile, has cast himself as a martyr to political censorship.

Ideological avenger

The film stars Armie Hammer as Michael Sanders, an American who takes it upon himself to cleanse a nameless European city of its migrant population. What distinguishes Sanders from the long lineage of vigilante screen heroes – Charles Bronson’s Paul Kersey being the obvious antecedent – is the absence of personal motive.

Bronson’s Kersey was a man broken by grief, his violence rooted in recognisable human anguish. Sanders has no such wound. He is purely ideological, an avenger without a face, and that is precisely the point. He is not a character. He is a messenger.

His targets are revealing. Sanders moves through corrupt officials, petty criminals and, in the film’s most chilling sequence, an entire Syrian migrant family, whom he executes after a lecture on the values they are supposedly importing.

Earlier, a teenage rapist is punished not by killing him but by murdering his parents and sister. The logic is unmistakeable: collective guilt, collective punishment. It is the logic of atrocity dressed in the language of justice.

Critics across the spectrum have reached for the same word: fascist. Not as hyperbole, but as a precise description.

Racialised social order

The film glorifies lawless violence in the service of restoring a racialised social order. It offers not just a fantasy but a methodology, a moral basis for extrajudicial killing that tells its audience not merely that such acts are justified, but how they might be carried out and against whom.

The American nazi Louis Beam’s concept of ‘leaderless resistance’, with the lone wolf terrorist as the idealised individual actor, unconnected to any organisation, striking for the cause, haunts every frame. Sanders is that same figure, but rendered heroic.

In a political environment where that fantasy has already produced real massacres, from Christchurch to Halle, the question of whether ‘Citizen Vigilante’ crosses the line from film to incitement is not an academic one.

It is, in the most literal sense, a film about how to do it and why.