Bloodied bodies dangle from the roof of a roadside car wash. Bullets clatter off the stairwells of a suburban office park. The Lincoln Memorial erupts in a nova of flame. What bites deepest in Alex Garland’s Civil War isn’t its narrative, but its imagery—the transformation of heartland America into a nightmarish near-future war zone.

That might surprise audiences looking for a high-concept, #resistance action flick. The premise—contemporary America wracked by a second civil war—seems urgently political, even overtly partisan. But Civil War is not that movie. Indeed, it’s almost eerie how hazily its central conflict is described.

In one sense, Civil War is the precise inverse of The Purge. The premise of the latter franchise—every year, all crime becomes legal for twelve hours as a sort of societal blowoff valve—is brilliant and fascinating. But despite this hook, that series has never served up anything other than the most generic horror tropes. Civil War leaves its premise murky and underdefined, but leans hard into everything else.

Based on the trailers, you might’ve expected Civil War to be an action movie. It’s more like The Last of Uswithout zombies, a long road odyssey across a grisly-yet-strangely-beautiful apocalyptic America. Photojournalist Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) and colleague Joel (Wagner Moura) aim to snag a final interview with an embattled president (Nick Offerman) in Washington D.C., as forces from the Western Front—an ambiguously allied Texas/California coalition—close in. (The country is balkanized even beyond that, but the “Florida Alliance” is referenced merely in passing.) Aspiring photographer Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) and veteran journalist Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) tag along for the ride.

The beating heart of the film is the people and situations they encounter along the way—from trigger-happy war criminals dumping bodies into a mass grave, all the way to a beautiful West Virginian downtown trying hard to pretend the conflict isn’t happening. Their journey is slow, elegiac, brutal, but never once dull. The driving scenario is simply too compelling for that.

Thematically, Civil War is something of a Rorschach test. For the most part, it’s politically noncommittal (Offerman’s villainous President is in his “third term” and has a few Trumpian rhetorical tendencies, but that’s about it). One can easily interpret it as a story about mass violence as such, about political polarization, or even the brutal and fragmented nature of modern warfare.

But to my mind, the most interesting reading of Civil War is as a story about journalism. In recent years, the contemporary mass media has faced a generational conflict, between grizzled professionals committed to the old ideal of “objectivity” and a more socially-conscious younger set. Something reminiscent of this plays out onscreen, with all its associated moral tensions. Lee is hardened and stoic, capable of passively photographing a burning man in a gasoline-soaked tire, but it is clear that her work still takes an emotional toll. For her, journalism is not primarily about social change; it is about distance and discipline. On the other hand, Jessie begins in naïve optimism, passion, and emotional investment, but soon embraces an aggressiveness more like Lee’s. And ultimately, Civil War concludes this tale on a brutally ambiguous note: Jessie metamorphosing into her reluctant mentor, leaving open exactly what she may or may not be willing to do for the one perfect shot.

Hence, Garland suggests, a paradox. Effective work as a journalist requires critical distance from one’s subject matter, but the process of formation required to attain such detachment is, in essence, moral cauterization: to be really good at the job means to be something less than human (or maybe, better, “less than humane”). Something like such an act of self-renunciation makes sense in the context of soldiering: lethality requires, at some level, vilification of the foe. But that sacrifice is performed in service of a clearly defined end (service to one’s country). Can the goal of “sharing information for its own sake” ever justify such a “distancing” from moral concern? American journalism hasn’t yet figured out how to answer this question, and Garland doesn’t attempt to do it here. But it is a problem well worth posing.

In the end, Civil War isn’t really a mainstream film—it’s far closer to arthouse fare—and won’t be to every viewer’s taste. But those willing to fully commit to Garland’s haunting vision will encounter something increasingly rare, in an age of CGI spectacle: a waking nightmare that looks and feels all too real. And it may be the smartest film I’ve seen this year.