There’s a fashion of late to view the West’s adventures in Afghanistan as doomed folly in the face of historic or even supernatural forces, indomitable in either case. Last year, Paul Gross took that quasi-mystical route with Hyena Road. This French offering goes further while avoiding the nationalism or hollow justifications that undermined the previous film.

The French squadron depicted in writer-director Clément Cogitore’s slow-burning film is doing the mundane work of securing a bleak chunk of mountainous desert near the border of Pakistan, but it’s also pissing in the dark. Literally, in fact, when one squaddie returns from a midnight squirt to find that his partner in a two-man outpost has vanished into thin air, just like two colleagues the previous night.

Jérémie Renier (In Bruges) is the square-jawed and fatally proud Capt. Bonassieu who doubles down when the mystery deepens, isolating his men from central command after satellite surveillance fails to yield any clues to the disappearances, and making unholy deals in his desperate search for answers with local villagers and the Taliban, both wary of the darker folk-magical practices common to the region. If there’s a baleful and hungry spirit in the air, it’s realer than bullets to the peasants who dare to cross NATO on their way to what might be a sacrificial sheep-burning—a situation that Cogitore captures through the eerie use of night-vision goggles.

Neither Heaven nor Earth comes off a bit like Kill List in these heavier and effective moments of incipient dread, although it’s far less hysterical. As a competent and rational man undone by something way beyond his ken, Bonassieu is the film’s all-purpose stand-in for occupying forces given the powerful message that they don’t belong. There’s a conscience to this film, and if it takes a spooky metaphor to express it, then Neither Heaven nor Earth has landed on a subtly memorable one.

Georgia Straight, August 2016