Alex Garland’s Terrifying War Movie Will Leave You Shaken [SXSW 2024]

All of Garland’s films blend disconcerting horror and staggering beauty, and “Civil War” does’t buck the trend. Like the veteran war photographer Ellie (played with a understated toughness by Kirsten “Hey, I’ve Been Undervalued For Years And Now I’m Going To Strut My Stuff” Dunst), Garland’s camera recognizes the unusual beauty and surreality that can accompany images of tremendous stress and terror. Quick flashes of joy and humanity accompany a visit to refugee camp, where people seem happy to just be alive. Snipers casually patrol the roofs of small towns. One especially unsettling sequence, a standoff with a sniper at a long-abandoned roadside Christmas experience, is the kind of haunting scene that gives the film its specific nightmare heartbeat. Something so typically and tacky, something so American, becomes the site of total inhumanity.

As Ellie and her crew head south, hoping to reach Washington D.C. to secure an interview with the President of the United States before the capitol falls, the film follows a familiar road trip formula. Some vignettes are more effective than others. Some pit stops are little short stories unto themselves, a “day in the life” of these four journalists as they struggle to do their jobs. Others exist to just characters tell each other their life stories (the weakest moments of the film, frankly). A few allow Garland, who expressed such a fascination with the corruption of worlds both natural and manmade in films like “Annihilation” and “Ex Machina,” to just turn his camera toward impossible, startling imagery and to just let us exist in it all.

It’s no accident that these images, among the most haunting of the film, often barely draw the eyes of the folks on the screen. It’s that objective voice that steers the film from frame one — this is their reality now, they’ve seen this before, and they’re on the hunt for something bigger. And hopefully something final.