French director Francois Truffaut is often quoted as saying that it is impossible to make an anti-war movie, as the filming of war will inevitably glamorize the violence by exciting the audience. I respectfully submit that Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker succeeds, at last, at portraying war as a brutal and endless game of attrition.

Calling The Hurt Locker “anti-war,” though, is an oversimplification. The film, written by Mark Boal (who previously wrote the far more melodramatic In the Valley of Elah), simply acknowledges that war exists and that for some people it is a drug they cannot (and will not) walk away from. Our starring addict is Staff Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner), leader of a three-man bomb disposal squad in Baghdad circa 2004.

James is a little dangerous and a little reckless, but he’s very good at his job—which involves suiting up and manually defusing IEDs, often while the people who set the bomb watch. While most people (including other Army grunts) stay away from bombs, James is not intimidated by them. They’re the force that gives his life meaning.

The other two members of James’ team provide counterbalance. Sergeant Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) brooks no dissent and Specialist Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) seems on the verge of a breakdown whenever he’s not in the field. Their job is arguably as difficult and nerve-wracking as James’: while James dismantles the bombs, Sanborn and Eldridge scan the crowds of rubberneckers for the man (or woman, or child) with their hand on the detonator.

When The Hurt Locker begins, their company has 30 more days before they rotate out of Iraq, and Sanborn and Eldridge have every intention of surviving. With James, you’re not so sure.

On paper, this is ideal stuff for an action thriller; the story is a literal procession of “ticking clock” scenarios where one or more lives are constantly in danger. But as with every other aspect of the film, Bigelow subverts what could be an action movie cliché (that ticking clock) with the simple and unsentimental observation that this suicide march is actually going on, every day, in real life.

In a lesser film the episodic structure would just be another way to ratchet up the tension with more and crazier scenarios. But here, too, The Hurt Locker is pragmatic: There is no real catharsis from the tension because there will just be another bomb tomorrow. James’ skill matters, but as with games of chance, the house always wins. If today’s bomb doesn’t get you, surely another one will.

The lack of pretension extends even to the casting. The Hurt Locker features cameos from a variety of talented actors: Guy Pearce as another bomb technician, Ralph Fiennes as a private contractor, David Morse as a cowboy colonel, and Evangeline Lilly as James’ wife back home. None of these cameos are flashy; in fact, some of them are hard to recognize. They are simply small roles played well by skilled performers.

The Hurt Locker has so much potential for cliché and sentimentality. James’ character could be the “loose cannon” maverick we’ve seen countless times before, but Renner and Mackie are too skilled, too authentic to slip into the overwrought. (Geraghty’s Eldridge too often succumbs to melodrama, but that is more a fault of the script than of the performer, and those moments are thankfully rare.) You have known these people.

Bigelow is a serially underrated director. Her film Strange Days was the best science fiction film of the ’90s and was, like this movie, clear-eyed and unafraid to involve its audience in something far more authentic than the usual genre film rollercoaster. In The Hurt Locker she gives us a war film that is sympathetic without being sentimental. And in doing so, she has given us one of the best films of the year.