Are we entering the era of the apolitical Iraq film? I won’t see Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker until later in the week, but the accounts I’ve heard suggest that it’s an action film that happens to be set in Baghdad, with tunnel-vision on the technical aspects of warfare and an almost complete disregard for the politics of the war being fought there. Similarly, Matthew Newton’s drama Three Blind Mice is a film about Australian marines en route to Iraq, but the war these boys are heading into could be anywhere and backed by any kind of ideology, so timeless are the film’s ideas about camaraderie and duty. It’s essentially a modern redo of On the Town, with ample fist fights in place of fancy footwork, a much more cynical attitude towards the notion of patriotism, and a completely credible sense of verisimilitude. In fact, the writing and performances create such a life-like mise en scene that when movie-like violence happens, it’s as shocking as it would be in real life.

Harry, Sam and Dean, three 20-something boys dressed in full Royal Australian Navy reglia, crash into a Sydney hotel room, where they’ll spend a single night before heading to the Gulf. They fall into three types right away: Harry (played by the writer/director) is the charismatic schemer, Dean is the uptight innocent, Sam the brooder with a secret. Amidst intimations that “something happened out there” which Sam is still recovering from and the other boys aren’t sure how to deal with, Harry calls to arrange a late-night hooker visit as a back-up before the boys head out into the night looking to drink and get laid. Newton’s handheld camera follows them closely throughout the sleepless night to follow, their pale white faces more often than not lit blue by neon street lights, as their interactions with one another and others build slowly towards a shuffling of their moral standings and personal identities.

Mice is full of incredibly long dialogue scenes which inevitably attain a natural-feeling momentum, maybe in spite of the rapid-fire edits with which they’ve been put together. The first notable example of this is an epic scene set around a poker table, which begins with the awkwardness of two groups of strangers being thrown together for an activity that, being that it involves a modicum of trust and gauging of sincerity, is probably best kept to friends. Not only does the gradual collision of personalities in this scene allow Newton to reveal what his characters are capable of, but it implicitly comments on the tension between street-smart young men who defend themselves and their own interests every day, and the relatively sheltered navy boys, who are decorated for ostensibly defending their country and its interests, but to this point have only spent months at a time stuck on a boat mired in petty procedure and miles away from any sort of action.

But what we think we’ve learned up to that point gets thrown on its head in the film’s centerpiece, a meet-the-folks dinner which an excessive infusion of sake sends off the rails, pushing Dean to confess his role in the incident that may push one of the three to desertion. Newton manages to steer his characters from amiability to rowdiness to dead-serious, straight faced moral bankruptcy in the course of a single long meal without once loosing his uncanny grasp of conversational naturalism. Mice’s final act feels a bit forced and unearned, but on the whole it marks Newton as an exciting new talent to watch.