The combination of a declared open-ended war on terrorism abroad and the curtailment of civil liberties at home sets the stage for some important questions about the necessity and scale of governmental secrecy in a world without the comfortable parameters of the Cold War. A 2008 Sundance alumnus, new documentary Secrecy delves into the hidden world of national security policy and the “classification universe.” It’s big business, both in content (in a single recent year, the United States government classified about five times the number of pages added to the Library of Congress) and cost, but when does security erode, rather than enhance, democracy?

To their credit, co-directors Robb Moss and Peter Galison don’t merely indulge in easy government-bashing; they give open forum to a variety of opinions, underscoring how secrecy can neutralize as well as foster certain threats. But the messily structured Secrecy comes off as not much more than an aperitif. The three main threads here are the situation of Khaled El-Masri, a German citizen detained, beaten and held for months by the CIA; the recent Hamdan v. Rumsfeld Supreme Court case; and 1952’s United States v. Reynolds, in which the government appealed a circuit court victory by wartime widows to learn more about the Air Force crash that killed their husbands and fathers. The latter established the legal precedent of a state secrets privilege, and is the poisonous tree from which the fruit of all modern legal stonewalling falls. Secrecy, though, interweaves these strands rather poorly. Artistically inflected animation segments, meanwhile, seem mainly designed to pad the running time, and forestall a more rigorous examination of the very real ethical friction under the microscope. In the end, Secrecy never moves beyond the realm of the theoretical; it only scratches the surface of its area of inquiry, both in content and intellectual forcefulness. For local playdates and more information, click here. (Argot Pictures, unrated, 80 minutes)