Killing Time ZERO DARK THIRTY’S THEATRE OF CRUELTY

Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar victory for The Hurt Locker (2008) represented a rare feat – the film received the coveted double gong for Best Picture and Best Director. In the process, Bigelow became the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director, widely viewed as a progressive step forward for an industry that is often criticised for its lack of diversity. Expectations were high for Bigelow’s follow-up effort, but the resultant film proved considerably more challenging and controversial than many might have expected. In purporting to offer an authentic, insider’s account of the CIA’s hunt for al-Qaeda founder and spiritual leader Osama bin Laden, Zero Dark Thirty (2012) makes few concessions to its viewer, both in terms of its fast-paced, jargon-heavy narrative and in its brutal depiction of the intelligence agency’s use of torturous interrogation techniques. In attempting to meet the high expectations in the wake of The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty provides a compelling and challenging self-portrait that confronts audiences through what it depicts, what it obscures, what it intends to say and what it inadvertently reveals.

The film begins with a black screen, accompanied by audio of emergency calls and dispatches in the moments following the September 11 World Trade Centre attack, a formal device that borrows from Alejandro González Iñárritu’s instalment in the earlier anthology film 11'09"01: September 11 (2002). prologue establishes the fragmentary sensibility that the film’s narrative proper will adopt, along with its willingness to wade into difficult ethical territory around its depiction of the United States’ legacy regarding international terrorism. The film follows Maya (Jessica Chastain), a CIA analyst who arrives at the American embassy in Pakistan to join the search for bin Laden (Ricky Sekhon) in the wake of 9/11.