There aren’t many films I watch where I feel my heart is in my mouth right up until the final act. Alex Garland is not one of my favourite directors so perhaps my expectations were slightly lowered for this intimate meditation on media and the personal choices we make.

This is a dystopian near future with the USA in Civil War. It’s unspecified why, but of course that is the same with all wars, where it is always someone wanting power and someone else not wanting to give it to them. Kirstin Dunst plays Lee Miller, the world weary war photographer who is heading to the front line with fellow journalist Joe (Wagner Moura). The president (Nick Offerman) is holed up in DC and they want to travel into enemy territory to get an interview, in their words ‘it’s the only story left.’

The second act is effectively a road movie as they pick up two fellow travellers, Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) who is a much older and more world weary journalist, and young war photographer wannabe Jessie (Cailee Spaeny).

As they travel we see what civil war looks like. There are refugee camps, gun battles in deserted buildings that perhaps once were a school, backwater individuals meting out their own justice in terrible ways, and even pockets of rural life where everyone seems oblivious to the strife.

The insight is through Lee’s photographs and, increasingly, Jessie‘s where we begin to recognise the kinds of images we lap up in print and online media. Being a photographer, I felt like I was with Jessie every step of the way as she is forced to learn to suppress her emotion and just keep clicking.

There are some great set pieces – Joe holding on to the back of Jessie’s Kevlar vest and propelling her forward to take a shot and then back to shelter from gunfire. You see the finely tuned instincts of someone who has seen it all. The scene with Jesse Plemons, who is uncredited and is Kirstin Dunst’s real-life partner, is where the tension really starts to escalate and from this point on, I couldn’t tear my eyes from the screen. The final scenes are deeply emotional, and familiar in that they capture the kind of photography we want to see.

On the surface this film is about media and the all too likely prospect of civil war in a civilised country. You can see how easily it could come to this with opinions becoming more polarised and factions emerging. If it were just that, perhaps it would not be so moving, but the sub text is Lee, heading towards the end of her career and we witness what it has taken from her. Jessie is at the other end, and there is a slow swapping of characteristics between them as she emerges into a Lee of the future.

Dunst is really great, there is something in her that reminds me of me, not just the photography but in the solidity of her middle-aged body, the weariness that comes from realising that the idealism of your youth has come to nothing.

I had only one niggle, and that was Jessie using film and not digital. I can see the poetry of it, the logic that she only had her father’s Nikon film cameras to work with, and that back in the day, this is what war photographers would be dealing with. It’s just the way it was betrayed didn’t seem so authentic, particularly when she is developing her films on the road – where would she wash them? And how many frames she seems to get out of that final roll.