An unusual documentary short subject in which h.s. friends recall the youth of a possible terrorist

The recent (2019) Netflix documentary short subject, Ghosts of Sugar Land (directed by Bassam Tariq) is a potential Oscar nominee but probably without enough substance to take the prize. Tariq interviews five or so guys - friends of his from high-school days? - from the small Texas city of their youth; the interviewees are all Muslim-American, and they are struggling to understand the life course of one of their h.s. friends, whom they refer to by the pseudonym Mark. Mark was the only African-American in their otherwise diverse high-school class. He become close friends of these Muslim-American classmates and eventually converted to their faith. Once he did so, he became a fanatic believer and eventually left the U.S. and made his way to Syria where he pledged loyalty to Isis and began an active anti-American cyber-presence. His behavior mystifies his friends, and they speculate that perhaps all along he was an FBI plant spying on the Sugar Land mosque and that he may still be an FBI operative trying to smoke out potential terrorist threats. There's not much drama in this story, as it's entirely told by talking heads - or, I should say, talking masks, as all of the interview subjects wear Halloween masks throughout their interviews, probably to protect their identities (though Sugar Land residents will probably be able to ID them all) and in part to give the film a weird, almost psychedelic and spooky atmosphere - a Stephen King nightmare come to documentary life. In the end, through closing credits, we learn more about Mark's fate. Props to Tariq for recognizing that he had about a half-hour of material here and for not making this film any longer than it needed to be.