A24's Warfare, directed by Alex Garland, is groundbreaking, realistic and frustrating

Across 96 disorienting minutes, Warfare strictly hews to the perspective of its young platoon of American Navy SEALs, who attempt an evacuation during the 2006 Battle of Ramadi in the Iraq War.

Hostile forces are barely glimpsed, their presence marked by a suppressive patter of bullets. War doesn't make an action hero out of its characters; it shell-shocks them into oblivion.

The film also boasts an unprecedented veracity: half of its writing and directing team is Iraq vet Ray Mendoza (the other half being Civil War's Alex Garland), who sought to forensically recreate a real-life incident from his own tour of duty without Hollywood embellishment. Accounts from other survivors were also incorporated into the narrative.

"If it didn't exist in someone's memory, it did not go into the story," Mendoza told The Guardian.

This kind of gritted, no-nonsense approach makes Warfare an outlier in a genre notorious for blood lust and jingoistic cliché. Yet its narrow POV, by necessity, obscures the horrors that lie just out of frame.

More than two decades on from the invasion of Iraq, it's downright dispiriting to watch a film so disinterested in anything other than the plight of the American soldiers involved.

Warfare begins on an empty suburban Iraqi street in 2006, the members of SEAL team Alpha One silently trickling into frame. Their recon mission takes them into one of the residences, where civilians, including children, are woken up at gunpoint and herded into a single room.

In an inversion of Zero Dark Thirty's climax, there are no targets to be neutralised. We watch as a terrified family huddles in a corner while a battering ram crashes through their home, and the barrel of a rifle peeks out. It is one of the film's few, fleeting acknowledgements of the innocent lives affected by the surrounding conflict.

The soldiers set up shop in the emptied apartment, using it as a base from which to observe nearby enemy movements. Garland and Mendoza patiently couch the film's first third in languorous stretches of surveillance, following a sniper's scope as it trails over pedestrians and snaps towards suspicious activity.

As more men begin to enter the area outside, the team realise they're being surrounded — as one soldier puts it, "They're getting their jihad on."

When an IED (improvised explosive device) thwarts an evacuation attempt, leaving two men grievously wounded and another dead, the SEALs find themselves trapped inside and without air support.

Key to the film's immersion is its pronounced sense of duration; departing from typical Hollywood editing, the film is structured so that its action seemingly takes place in real time.

While long, continuous takes have become shorthand for realism (see: 1917), the nightmarish onslaught of Warfare is brittle in its construction, anxiously cutting between the perspectives of each character as they endure life and death stand-offs, restless lulls and unbearable claustrophobia.

Thankfully, cinematographer David J. Thompson avoids abusing shaky handheld photography — another overused stylistic trope that's defined the modern war film canon. The effect is visceral but unobtrusive, never calling attention to itself.

Social media discussion has recently circulated around the film's stunt casting of younger, softer men as special forces grunts. For actors like Kit Connor, Noah Centineo, Charles Melton and Joseph Quinn — all best known for their respective Netflix teen franchises — their involvement (complete with sheared haircuts) reads as transparent attempts to come of age in the public eye, at least on paper.

In keeping with the directors' realism mandate, the heart-throbs are barely sketched out; light banter and stern brooding offer scant glimpses of characters before they're thrust into conflict, where they're frequently difficult to tell apart underneath their uniform, their personalities subsumed by the machinery of the unit. Impenetrable clouds of smoke, chemicals and dust are whipped up amid the mayhem, vanishing the soldiers into wispy silhouettes.

It's hardly glamorous work. In particular, Joseph Quinn (Stranger Things) is tasked with portraying a leading petty officer, Sam, who's left immobilised when flying shrapnel splinters his lower torso beyond recognition. (What remains is the kind of encrusted, mangled flesh most commonly seen in zombie films). The performance is a spectacle of agony, his squeals growing only more upsetting as the film marches forward.

The film is unsparing in depicting how this elite squad of troops — mythologised in pop culture for their hyper-competence, discipline and valour — almost immediately folds in the face of danger. Will Poulter's (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3) Erik, the Officer in Charge, spends most of the run time in a catatonic state. Kit Connor's (Heartbreaker) baby-faced Tommy dissolves into tears.

It's no secret that war films love forging hardened battlers out of pretty boys (to prove that even twinks can serve their country ), but to its credit, Warfare is uninterested in being that kind of movie.

Garland and Mendoza might have crafted something actually subversive if the film didn't resolve into a flag-waving paean to the troops, capped off by a reverent photo montage (once again flaunting its own credibility).

Mendoza has been explicit about how the endurance test of Warfare exists primarily for, and in service to, those real-life men represented on screen. Purely on his own terms, the film is a success, making modern combat feel more nasty, tense, and monotonous than audiences have come to expect. It's a story that no-one else would've — or could've — told.

Yet there's something insidious about how the film refuses to provide any context for the events on screen, particularly in an era when the Iraq War is receding into the distance. Like Garland's previous outing, Civil War, it brazenly invokes politics without committing to any specific idea, letting the viewer draw whatever conclusions they want.

The title 'Warfare' suggests its own universality — that the events on screen are true to the spirit of any conflict. The film is abstract enough to function as yet another story of young, inexperienced men blindsided by the fog of war, whose moral infringements were simply tough choices made in service of a vague (though surely worthy) goal.

By stripping the war on terror of its specifics — chiefly the disinformation campaigns, human rights violations and authoritarian terrors enacted by America and its allies — we risk erasing our cultural memory of its horrors.

The depoliticised realism of Warfare isn't nuance — it's cowardice.