Kathryn Bigalow’s outstanding The Hurt Locker is a rare Hollywood beast. A visceral, claustrophobic, hallucinatory filmic experience and an uncynical movie about war that, unlike its many precedents, dares not to glorify military heroism or glamourise conflict. It refuses to weigh up the reasons for war or fudge the drama of battle, but drags its audience into a catastrophic military mire in which the combatants on either side are engaged in an almost unmilitary, in the traditional sense, “game” of wits and bravado. This is a film not about morality or impossible Manichean ideologies but one about men and, as an examination of the individual motivations that impel soldiers in Warfare 2.0 – not patriotism or jingoistic breast-beating but fragile terror or, as the film dares to suggest, the adrenaline rush – it is extraordinary.

Eschewing the conventions of narrative, Bigalow has constructed a series of gut-wrenchingly tense micro-dramas in which a three-man bomb disposal squad, led by gung-ho Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner), patrol between Kill Zones dismantling IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) in a drawn-out, almost Beckettian cycle of Russian roulette. James’ two subordinates, Sgt. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), are sucked headlong into his world, caught in a dichotomy between repulsion and empowerment. Yet, fearful for their own lives in the face of his recklessness they are likewise exhilarated and, in one pivotal scene that resembles nothing less than a Peckinpah-esque Wild West shoot out, inspired by his peculiarly paternal brand of leadership. To them the only way out, it would seem, is breakdown, injury or death.

For a film that bursts with energy The Hurt Locker feels, like the war, unnervingly static, unable or unwilling to drag itself to a conclusion, thus begging the question: should we see, in the absence of a traditional plot, a mirror for the aimless drift of modern combat and the perpetual rotation of deployment, adrenaline, damage, death, deployment, adrenaline…ad infinitum?

With hypnotic direction and some stunning photography Bigalow’s film simultaneously grips as it repels. Unflinching in its exploration of the intolerable, dark hinterland of twenty-first century combat it reveals the misshapen, tilted nightmare faced by the tragic men and women in Iraq’s bloody confusion. It is a strikingly powerful and brilliant piece of filmmaking.