Zero Dark Thirty

Let’s tackle the waterboard in the room first. Does Kathryn Bigelow’s CIA thriller condone torture? Well, if you believe controversy hunters, drawn like moths to its incendiary subject matter, its depiction of ‘enchanced interrogation’ is blandly unquestioning at best, actively supportive at worst. Leaving aside the idea that the director of Strange Days, pretty much a liberal manifesto clad in sci-fi clothing, is some kind of crypto-fascist, the flak flying in Bigelow’s direction misreads a subtle, intelligent film that deliberately leaves the viewer to tackle the questions of morality it raises. There’s no spoonfeeding on offer, no easy answers; just an acute reflection of the byzantine, murky world of spies, politicians and terrorists that should reasonably keep you awake at night.

Our conduit into it is ‘Maya’ (not her real name), played by Jessica Chastain (real name) with exactly the kind of cold-eyed gaze and restraint you’d expect in a real-life spook. Contextualised by a haunting audio montage of voices from the Twin Towers that definitely will keep you awake at night, her task is a stark one. She ghosts from one CIA black site to another, playing uneasy witness to interrogations run with brutal efficiency by Jason Clarke’s wonk, hunting a lead to the elusive ‘OBL’. One Al-Qaeda suspect after another is waterboarded, humiliated, and, in one particularly gruelling instance, incarcerated in a box barely bigger than a kitchen shelf. It’s not played for sensation – like Ken Loach’s Route Irish, we’re spared none of the mundane horror of the American inquisition – and when a name is finally spluttered up by a defeated suspect, lips loosened by a rare moment of kindness, you’d need to be Dick Cheney to feel a sense of uplift.

Lead secured, Maya’s hunt for bin Laden enables Bigelow to crank through the gears, flaunting her command of thrilling set-pieces with sequences that rival The Hurt Locker for adrenaline expenditure. One, involving two cars, a crowded souk and a mobile phone, is a masterclass in simple tension-building. It’s no spoiler to point out that the movie ends with another, more renowned, event, this time in bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound, or that it ends badly for the terrorist. Here, too, Bigelow eschews big musical cues and gung-ho thrills to let the event tell its own story. Like what comes before, it’s executed with the confidence and brio of an Oscar-winner.