Zero Dark Thirty

Here is the world as it ends: alone, stunned, and with the never-ceasing echoes of alarms. Not with a bang, but many.

Zero Dark Thirty is incredible for what it tries to achieve. Alongside The Social Network, it is one of few attempts in recent film to chronicle the state of the world as we have it now, in front of us.

As a procedural, it works well. The film covers many years and breaks them into loosely shaped episodes, feeling more like a filmed non-fiction piece than a piece of cinema. Certain moments do lend towards the cinematic and the big-noting of character moments – particularly a central episode, ‘The Meeting’ – but these occasional leanings towards tradition and type in film are grounded within the horrific terrain of the subject material.

This is a film that begins with terror and, on the outside at least, tries to document a search for peace after one act of terror.

The opening sequence, though much talked about for its depictions of torture, is actually the easiest to manage, and it’s hard to see how some critics can maintain this shows a sanctioning of torture as a valid method of interrogation. To do so would reduce the film to simple cause-and-effect, whereby it begins with torture used to discover the links to Bin Laden’s whereabouts, and by the film’s ending he has been found and killed. The film, and life, is not that simple.

From the torture scenes onwards, the film documents a descent into hell, not a rising out of it. The truth, and certainty in it, becomes harder and harder to identify and process, and the audience is forced to question the cost of everything. The cost of lives, of humanity, to spend a decade in search of one man and make him to atone for his crimes. It begs us to question whether this is the legacy that we want to leave history to document.

As such, Zero Dark Thirty is unusual in its structure and approach to a difficult subject. Unusually, it comes to resemble The Silence of the Lambs, with its female detective navigating her way through a seemingly impenetrable chaos of leads and dead-ends. Terror and horror in both films are the same: unique, graphic and unintelligible. The compound in Abbottabad that secured Bin Laden is akin to Buffalo Bill’s basement of horrors – right down to the extensive night-vision and claustrophobia – as our protagonists descend further and further into hell to root out evil once and for all. Tellingly, the difference between the two films is that one can only feel as if the protagonists in Zero Dark Thirty brought hell with them when they landed in that compound, and have subsequently made the world that way. There is no salvation, no atonement for sins, just the fear, the paranoia of more terror on the horizon.

This film is the constant wailing of alarms in the distance that we have to live with, whether they’re real or just rattling around as echoes in our heads.