A fractured America. A team of journalists racing to Washington before the capital falls. Alex Garland has no interest in telling you who's right.
Civil War is one of the most deliberately unsettling films in recent memory — a war movie that asks what it costs to bear witness. Kirsten Dunst is extraordinary as Lee, a veteran photojournalist who has documented atrocities across the world and is beginning to lose herself in the process. Cailee Spaeny matches her as Jessie, the young photographer Lee reluctantly takes under her wing, whose desensitization to violence over the course of the journey is one of the film's most disturbing throughlines. The villain isn't ambiguous — Nick Offerman's authoritarian president and Jesse Plemons' chilling militia commander make that clear — but Garland is more interested in the journalists caught in the middle: what they photograph, what they choose not to, and what that does to a person. Cinematographer Rob Hardy renders it all in images that are genuinely hard to shake.
Brutal, brilliant, and designed to make you deeply uncomfortable. One of the defining films of 2024 and essential viewing now more than ever. Stream it on Hulu.