Reteaming Bigelow and Boal, Detroit lacks the clarity of their previous collaborations but the ambitious period drama maintains their power to disturb, and question what it is to be an American.
Yes, the movie's harrowing middle hour is almost too excruciating to endure. It upsets viewers and sends them streaming for the exits because it's supposed to.
It's hard to overstate just how visceral and harrowing an experience it is. Detroit is a well-made and evocative film that is also numbingly brutal with little to no reprieve.
Bigelow's recent work is a cinema of big, difficult questions, but its cold treatment of trauma often leaves an empty impression, one that doesn't make the viewer understand or appreciate the moral implications of evil.
This may be the point that racist violence reduces its victims to an atrocious nothingness. But the unrelenting atrocity, so lacking in dramatic or emotional modulation, becomes numbing.