John Cena and Aaron Taylor-Johnson in The Wall Credit: Courtesy of Amazon Studios and Roadside Attractions

Imagine a vast, undifferentiated desert landscape where sand and sky blur, where camouflaged soldiers look no different than scrub brush and boulders. The only relief from this implacable claustrophobic sameness is a crumbling stone wall than can mean the difference between life and death.

For 90 intense minutes in this deadly psychological thriller, The Wall keeps the viewer suspended between both poles as two American soldiers and an Iraqi sniper torment and tease one another in a lethal cat-and-mouse game. It may be 2007, and Pres. Bush 43 may have declared the American/Iraqi War officially over, but not everyone has gone home. Both soldiers are wounded, hunkered down on either side of a disintegrating wall, while somewhere the sniper waits for his opportunity. The twist here is that the damaged radio can’t be used to contact the base for reinforcements and rescue. Instead, all must rely on a local frequency, so essentially they communicate in an accented, garbled, static-filled, f-bomb laced three-way conference call.

Now the game that involves bullets and marksmanship turns to a battle of wills, with the extra dimension of the psychological torture of waiting, and waiting, and waiting (more Godot than Peckinpah) punctuated by astute and unnerving questions from the sniper. He certainly seems to know considerably more about the soldiers than they know about him — including where he’s located.

It’s terrifying and unrelenting.

And, apparently, based on legends of an Iraqi sniper called Juba, part of the Sunni insurgent group Islamic Army in Iraq. News reports indicate that his exploits were touted in several videos released between 2005 and 2007, attributing hundreds of kills to this sniper, not only a master of sharpshooting but also able to get deep under the skins of U.S. troops.

Indeed, this faceless — but never voiceless — Iraqi sniper soon gets under the viewer’s skin too. Each slick question, each existential suggestion, each insightful connection is straight from the playlist of psychological warfare, and if the soldier is in a weakened, vulnerable state already, the brainwash is as deadly as the bullets.

The two soldiers are portrayed by Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Nocturnal Animals, Kick-Ass, Godzilla) and WWE star and Land O' Lakes resident John Cena (Trainwreck, Daddy’s Home). They convey the easy camaraderie of soldiers totally dependent on one another for their lives. Taylor-Johnson is Sgt. Allan Isaac, known as Ize (Eyes), who serves as the spotter to Army Ranger Staff Sgt. Shane Matthews, played by Cena. Ize must supply the technical side of being a marksman — distance, wind, ballistic trigonometrics — using a spotting scope from his ex-partner. This partner and this scope become a crucial part of the plot. The Iraqi sniper is played by voice actor Laith Nakli.

Cena provides the beefed, square jawed, hunky cocksureness the role requires and his brand projects. But it’s Taylor-Johnson’s film. He is masterful.

John Cena in THE WALL Credit: Courtesy of Amazon Studios and Roadside Attractions

Shot in anamorphic 16mm film near Edwards Air Force Base in the high desert outside Los Angeles, cinematographer Roman Vasyanov (Bright, Suicide Squad, Fury, End of Watch) has provided indelible images — yes, of stone and sand and sky and soldier, all in a monotone palette, with vicious heat and hideous weather — that nonetheless have the power and impact of even the grandest war epic. This particular film stock enables us to see both the immensity and impersonality of the desert, as well as the immediacy and intimacy of a soldier’s face, his eyes, his hands and practically his wildly beating heart surging through his desert camouflage. There doesn’t seem to be a single gratuitously stylized frame of combat footage; just a man, a scope, a POV, a wall and a battle of wits and wills.

Rarely has such a vast landscape been controlled in such a contained and claustrophobic space. The psychological impact is ratcheted up significantly when the Iraqi sniper is so proficient with English (perhaps somewhat unrealistic and implausible, and really, a Iraqi sniper who can quote the entirety of Poe’s “The Raven”? WTF?), that language becomes a weapon as effective as the AK-47. When the sniper and the soldier parry over the radio, their dialogue reveals commonalities — and a vast divide. Just as the sniper manages to use language to camouflage his intention, making it merely another weapon in the arsenal, both sniper and soldier hide behind words and walls.

And both words and walls ultimately crumble.

Masters of war cinema that explored the psychological dimensions of conflict include Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, Stone’s Platoon, Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and Malick’s Thin Red Line. All had massive canvases on which to tell their stories.

Here, in The Wall, we have one color, one set, three characters (one unseen), and 20 feet of wall. One could argue the wall itself is a character, a tenuous buffer between soldier and sniper. Snaking through the area also is a pipeline, a looming presence that underlines our interest in the Middle East and the sacrifice of human life that occurs because of the need for oil. It’s never spoken of in story terms, never politicized, just stands there as a silent, deadly witness to the conflict around it.

Even with this reduced canvas, or maybe especially because of it, Director Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Edge of Tomorrow) has constructed a breathlessly tight film based on first-time screenwriter’s Dwain Worrell screenplay. It is a taut, compact, satisfying hour-and-a-half of cinema without an extraneous element, an antidote to Hollywood’s bigger-is-better bloat.

This article appears in May 11-18, 2017.