Zero Dark Thirty is seen almost exclusively through the eyes of Maya (Jessica Chastain), a young CIA operative who spends more than a decade in the pursuit of the most wanted man in US history. Like Clarice Starling in Silence Of The Lambs, she’s a tough woman in an almost exclusively male line of work; she bears witness to the brutal treatment of suspected al Quaida operatives held in secret bases in the Middle East and Poland, and repeatedly locks horns with bosses over her tenacious desire to locate a man she believes to have direct links to Bin Laden himself. These recognisable faces are important, because Zero Dark Thirty is a cold fish of a film more interested in procedure than emotion – Maya’s character is little more than a cypher, the audience’s eyes and ears in unfamiliar territory. The first 40-or-so minutes of the film are almost entirely concerned with the torture of a suspected terrorist, and it has to be said that this entire sequence of events is difficult to watch – not only because we’re seeing a human in pain, but also because it makes us question our sympathies. If Zero Dark Thirty does have a flaw, it’s that it falls between two stools. With lengthy scenes of meetings and interminable, often difficult to follow investigative chatter, it serves as a slow and overlong document of recent American history. And with the script devoting so little time to fleshing out Maya’s backstory, it doesn’t function particularly well as a character study, either. All we know is that she’s a stoic and determined, and that various events in the movie make her more stoic and determined still – at times, her determination reaches slightly absurd extremes, as she harangues bosses with numbers scribbled on office windows with magic markers, and swearily asserts herself in front of James Gandolfini’s avuncular CIA director. Such moments remind us that, although this is an attempt at soberly recounting history, Bigelow can’t quite keep Hollywood histrionics out of the picture. From a visual and technical standpoint, Zero Dark Thirty is an extremely well-made film. It’s excellently acted, superbly shot, and Bigelow knows how to inject tension into low-key scenes of action; the final sequence is perfectly staged, and absorbing enough to make us forget that we know roughly how it all ends.  Zero Dark Thirty opens on the 25th January in the UK. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.