In the tank: "Lebanon"

Samuel Maoz's Lebanon, last year's Venice Golden Lion winner, is a combat movie that engages a familiar low-budget conceit - limiting the action to one confined space - before transcending it; as in the German submarine drama Das Boot, we're invited to peer inside what is literally a war machine, and observe at close-quarters the scared and shellshocked human operators residing within. It's 1982, and we're deep inside the bowels of a tank codenamed Rhino on the first morning of the Israeli incursion into Lebanon. The inexperienced crew are obliged to rub along with one another and their own mounting doubts and fears, weighing heavy on their shoulders like the film of oil atop the water sloshing around at their feet; soon, after their opening mission goes awry, the tank's roster is extended to include the corpse of a fallen comrade, and a Syrian prisoner, caught taking a potshot at their bows.

Between bookending shots of the tank at repose in a sunflower field - what looks like an idyll at the start of the film, and a West Bank Valhalla by the end - the only other time the outside world is observed is through the tank's viewfinder. The choice might suggest an element of distancing - Maoz, a former tank gunner, is reflecting upon his own past here - were it not that what we see is wholly magnified; the viewfinder, in this instance, becomes an analogue for the camera, a clanking mechanical tool obliged to seek out new perspectives on a crazy, bloodstained world. Panning over and zooming in on the carnage, the viewfinder shows us scared faces, discarded trinkets, bodies blown apart; a bereaved madonna being stripped bare by one Israeli soldier after her dress catches fire in the chaos.

These images are as scattered, random and disturbing as repressed memories - live-action equivalents to the animated nightmares of Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir, again the result of a soldier-turned-filmmaker using the occasion of his first film to declare: this is what I saw. The viewfinder in Lebanon never blinks; it can only turn away from the horrors it witnesses at the slowest of speeds. Such close-quarters filmmaking requires a certain level of technical expertise, and Maoz proves every bit as attentive to the telling sounds of battle as to its horrendous sights, from the distant booms and anonymous screams that stand for the carnage being wreaked outside to the recurrent tinkle of the tank crew relieving themselves into the nearest available jerry-can. (As ever, the human bladder counts among the earliest casualties of war.)

This new wave of conciliatory Israeli filmmaking - taking in Bashir, and Joseph Cedar's Beaufort - has been accused in certain quarters of boo-hooing; that they are the work of directors who have taken lives, or witnessed lives being taken, and now cannot wash their hands of the blood. Certainly, Lebanon offers some special pleading on behalf of these boyish, confused soldiers - at the expense of their dogmatic commanding officer (Zohar Strauss), who sanctions the use of illegal phosphorous, and of the so-called Christian Phalangists, who smile, and in smiling, threaten the worst. In Waltz with Bashir, Folman's agony - and the potential source of his redemption - lay in the fact his troop merely provided the illumination for the Phalangists to go about their murderous business; there, as here, we may feel that a "just following orders" defence is being entered into the cinematic record.

Again, though, the overwhelming sense is that a real and lasting trauma is being, if not dispelled entirely, then at least worked through: the most telling set-piece in the second half occurs during an impasse, when a senior officer recounts the story of how a lover once held him to her breast and encouraged him to cry his fears away. (When, at the anecdote's conclusion, a younger soldier pipes up with "you gave me a hard-on with that story", he is, in his naivety, altogether missing the point.) "Man is steel, the tank is only iron," runs the legend inscribed into the very heart of the tank - the kind of maxim beloved of warmongers everywhere, yet which Maoz here goes out of his way to prove self-deluding nonsense; the unflinching gaze of this potent, impressively handled first feature pierces your armour, and gets right under your skin.

Lebanon is on release in selected cinemas.