Rated R

The subject of the hunting and killing of Osama bin Laden is an uncomfortable one at best, and something that seems distasteful for a mainstream movie. It is the story of the most powerful nation in the world trying to find one man for 10 years, torturing quite a few people along the way, and then killing him. Whether that was revenge or justice or simply for the greater good, it happened outside the legal system, and the world cheered.

That’s treacherous territory for a movie. On the one hand, pursuit of the most dangerous terrorist in history is certainly a ripe and fair subject for storytelling, but on the other hand, this is our present history, and it is about who we still are as a civilization and the choices we make about how to behave in the world. So will we choose to tell ourselves heroic, reassuring stories, or will the stories we tell be self-abasing, guilt-ridden apologies?

“Zero Dark Thirty” is an unbelievably grim movie that somehow dances straight down the middle. Director Kathryn Bigelow (“The Hurt Locker”) has crafted a dramatization that feels like it isn’t, even though, certainly... it is. The main character, a CIA analyst named Maya (Jessica Chastain) who stays on the bin Laden case for 10 years, is wholly fictional, a device to bind the story together. Once one understands that she is just a placeholder for the various people who kept the investigation alive, the rest of the movie feels like a rigid, almost dry depiction of modern intelligence gathering and spycraft. Finding bin Laden was 10 years of failure, boredom, and frustration glued together with determination and then lit up in a few places by luck and inspiration, and this is fascinating to watch, almost a modern bookend to “Argo,” which showed us the CIA in the 1970s. One almost wishes it was a documentary, but then again, if it were a documentary there are many scenes that we wouldn’t be able to experience the same way.

Much of the movie hangs on scenes of waterboarding and “enhanced interrogation,” and the information, both good and bad, that comes from it, yet it somehow does this without moralizing about it. If you think waterboarding doesn’t sound that bad, then the film will show you quite clearly that this is a kind of drowning torture that shouldn’t be prettified with euphemism, but what you take away from that is up to you. If you’re an end-justifies-the-means sort, you’re going take away from the film the viewpoint of the CIA interrogators that this is a necessary tool. If you’ve been following headlines about the low value of such information, you’re going to read this as chest-thumping propaganda. If you’re more of a humanitarian, you’re going to see that pursuit of monsters puts those doing the dirty work in the position of performing acts that most of us would never want on our hands, individually or as a society. But the movie doesn’t tell us which to think.

The final act is a lengthy depiction of the raid that killed bin Laden, which is riveting for the detail it deploys. It’s not as if the outcome is unknown, nor is the mission very complicated, but each door blown, burned or shot through feels like it opens a window further into the weird world of S.E.A.L Team 6 and modern special warfare.

Even though a documentary would have been more factual, our lives as we understand them are not made of facts, but stories. And while “Zero Dark Thirty” is more of a mirror than most movies, and we’ll see ourselves in it, it is a heck of a dark mirror.