Eye in the Sky (2015)

Gavin Hood's 2015 thriller assembles a multinational apparatus of colonels, lawyers, pilots and ministers, all of them bound by video link to a Nairobi safe house where three Al-Shabaab leaders are arming suicide vests. The machinery of the film is procedural and precise: a Reaper drone flown from Nevada, a Kenyan agent crawling through a market with an insect-sized camera, a British general herding politicians toward a decision none of them wants to own. Helen Mirren holds the center as Colonel Katherine Powell, issuing orders into a room full of men who outrank her in theory and defer to her in practice. The film never pauses to congratulate itself on that arrangement, which is to its credit. She is simply the most competent person present, and the story treats this as unremarkable.

The moral architecture is a seminar with a body count. Every rung of the chain of command passes the question upward, and every rung offers a fresh argument about legality, proportionality and political fallout, until the only person who cannot abstract the decision away is a pilot watching a nine-year-old girl sell bread outside the target. The film is careful to give each position its due, which keeps it from becoming a sermon even as it flirts with the form. The Kenyan setting and the Kenyan performers, Barkhad Abdi among them, lend the proceedings a texture that feels observed instead of assembled. When the girl dies, the weight lands as a postcolonial wound without the screenplay ever announcing it as such.

What lingers is the exhaustion of it. Alan Rickman's final live-action performance carries a weariness the film earns, and his rebuke to a civilian official lands with the force of a man who has stopped arguing and started remembering. The result is a taut, cerebral chamber piece about remote violence, more interested in the mechanics of complicity than in telling us how to feel. It is a serious film about serious things, and it mostly trusts us to keep up.