The Mes­sen­ger

Don’t shoot ​’em, goes the adage. But what if a mes­sen­ger pitched up on your doorstep to deliv­er the worst news of your life? Not that direc­tor Oren Moverman’s inti­mate, heavy-heart­ed dra­ma actu­al­ly involves any such gun­fire. No, it’s emo­tion­al fire­works that are the pri­or­i­ty here, with The Mes­sen­ger fol­low­ing two army offi­cers tasked with deliv­er­ing bad news to the fam­i­ly mem­bers of dead soldiers.

“I’m not gonna be offer­ing any hugs, sir,” gripes Staff Sergeant Will Mont­gomery (Ben Fos­ter), whose life has been the def­i­n­i­tion of ​‘spi­ralling despair’ ever since he got back from Iraq. The sir in ques­tion, mean­while, is Cap­tain Tony Stone (Woody Har­rel­son), the kind of guy who makes the bad-ass marines in Aliens look like frisky kit­tens. Togeth­er, they do the job nobody else wants to.

It’s a smart premise, the char­ac­ter-inclined slant afford­ing The Mes­sen­ger a fresh­ness that the bul­let-rid­dled, war-wail likes of The King­dom couldn’t hope to attain. Of course, it helps to have had a man on the inside. An ex-para­troop­er him­self, Mover­man clear­ly has demons to exor­cise with his direc­to­r­i­al debut.

Unfor­giv­ing in his endeav­ours to cap­ture the pain and hor­ror of those left behind dur­ing times of war, Mover­man extracts white hot per­for­mances from his cast (“You fuck­ing cow­ards!” screams a ter­rif­ic Steve Busce­mi, the father of a dead sol­dier), while also unearthing the mid­night humour in the har­row­ing events (“Could be worse, could be Christ­mas,” dead­pans Tony dur­ing one rough job).

Though Har­rel­son was the one nom­i­nat­ed for major awards, Fos­ter is the eye of the storm here. Through him, Mover­man enacts his tes­ti­mo­ni­al against war, with Fos­ter nev­er any­thing less than 100 per cent up to the task. The Mes­sen­ger is a movie that deliv­ers its own moral tale – one many are prob­a­bly not going to like.