Maybe it takes an Italian to give such a brutally plain look at the US Civil War.

Director Roberto Minervini has been resident in the US for 20+ years and this is his first foray into fiction. It feels like documentary, though, as we are in the midst of Montana nowhere with a small band of Union soldiers scouting the ‘uncharted’ Northwest.

It’s cold and the enemy, who we never see clearly, is out there somewhere. We watch as they march and ride, make camp, drink coffee and talk about their guns and rifles. They are old and young, all nameless and with the faces of ordinary people. There’s no driving narrative, just the interminable waiting and then the awful chaos of a battle. And it’s not your typical cinematic battle. It’s at twilight and all that can be seen of the enemy is the orange flash of their gunfire. The men scramble and hide or run toward the danger so that their inadequate guns are in range. That the enemy is so vague focuses on the individual, isolating reality of war. 

It feels very naturalistic and I later read that the actors are non-professionals, friends, people from the directors previous projects and others found through casting calls. The conversations are unscripted and so we get a disorienting feeling of contemporary sensibilities laid over the past. There is talk about why they are there, what is right and wrong and good and evil and what part God plays in a war between citizens. The cinematography is bleak and gorgeous with a mournful score by cinematographer Carlos Alfonso Corral.

Our focus gradually narrows to a scouting party of four, ordered to find a passage through mountains. There is heavy snow and just the sounds of the forest and the mountains that could be wind in the trees or enemy riders coming. There is no great dramatic finish, just men lost in the beauty and terror of the land.

I sat there through the credits feeling tearful and deeply moved. After seeing Garland’s Civil War (2024) – so different in tone and experience – they feel like two sides of our present day, making us reflect on why we divide and fight for the honour of being right and proving someone else wrong. It feels like a pattern we just keep repeating.