You don't see much of Osama bin Laden in Kathryn Bigelow's intricate, lengthy but gripping film about the decade it took to find him. He's largely a spectre, a photo at the top of a whiteboard, and then, briefly, a prop.
Nor do you see his crime - 9/11 is depicted at the film's beginning as a blackened screen to the sound of panicked phone calls from high in the Twin Towers. Sound also defines the closing scene of Jessica Chastain's CIA officer Maya, after her long mission is complete. She's alone on a military transport home to a cheering nation. She's too far away to hear it, too exhausted by her eight years of toil to join in.
And Bigelow's deft touches of restraint - albeit in a movie which unflinchingly depicts the agency's "enhanced interrogation" of Al Qaeda detainees, scenes which have alarmed many a US politician - as well as Chastain's performance is what makes Zero Dark Thirty compelling.
Yes we know, more or less, how it all ended. And the arguments about how true Zero Dark Thirty is will continue until this year's Academy Award post-mortems.
But Bigelow and journalist scriptwriter Mark Boal, who were behind the Oscar-winning, Iraq war movie The Hurt Locker, here deliver a feasible, painstaking account that is anything but a dry here's-what-to-think docu-drama.
