109 min | R | April 12, 2024 | A24
Alex Garland makes a war film set in a fractured America and refuses to tell you whose side to take. Kirsten Dunst anchors it with the exhaustion of a woman who has seen too much.
The United States is at war with itself. The president is in his third term. Texas and California have seceded together. The Western Forces are advancing on Washington. A team of journalists decides to drive from New York to DC to interview the president before the capital falls. The film is not about the politics of the war. It is about the journalists covering it. Alex Garland made a deliberate choice to strip the conflict of partisan framing and that choice has infuriated people across the political spectrum. That fury is the point.
Kirsten Dunst plays Lee Smith, a legendary war photographer modeled on real conflict journalists. She is burned out and still working. The trauma is in her face and her posture and her inability to stop taking pictures. Dunst gives one of the best performances of her career. Wagner Moura plays Joel, a reporter with adrenaline addiction disguised as professional drive. Cailee Spaeny plays Jessie, a young photographer who idolizes Lee and does not understand what that admiration costs. Stephen McKinley Henderson plays Sammy, an aging New York Times journalist who provides moral gravity.
Garland directs with the visual language of embedded war journalism. The violence is sudden and disorienting. A sniper sequence in a small town is one of the most tense scenes in any film this year. Jesse Plemons appears in a single scene that is terrifying in its casual cruelty. The sound design puts you in the firefights. The music choices are jarring and deliberate. The film makes the familiar landscape of America look like every war zone Americans have watched on television and ignored.
The film is about what happens when journalism meets violence and whether bearing witness matters when no one is watching. Garland does not answer that question. He makes you sit with it. A24 spent more on this film than anything they have released. The money is on screen. The ambiguity is earned. This is a film that trusts its audience to be uncomfortable.