Starring Hend Ayoub and Brian Boland. Rating unavailable. Opens Friday, October 27, at the Fifth Avenue Cinemas

They used to say that a picture was worth a thousand words, the idea being that images contain the concentrated essence of truth. Since the release of Photoshop, I would imagine that the evidentiary weight of photographs, for one, has crashed like the Vancouver housing market will in six months—a picture is now worth only a few hundred words, and then only when it is shocking.

For example, there’s the image of a sitting president, specifically George W. Bush, taking a couple of slugs while shaking hands outside a Chicago hotel in October 2007. The president covers his wounded chest, drops to his knees, and is immediately jumped on by burly Secret Service guys and crushed like Steve Moore.

It’s a remarkable picture, even if it was assembled by computer and then inserted into Death of a President, a fictional documentary that examines the early reign of President Dick Cheney. The moment caps off an introductory sequence of almost unbearable tension, thanks to the audacious title of the movie, the utterly believable TV–style videography of the president in action, fine acting from the fake interviewees, and a dark, sleek musical theme from Richard Harvey.

Not that this movie has anything as trivial as entertainment in mind. From the opening aerial shot of Chicago contrasted with a female voice speaking urgently in Arabic, we know that we are supposed to be seeing an Important Statement About America. The United States government is not just George Bush, director Gabriel Range indicates. If Bush dies, the things you may fear about his presidency—like aggressive domestic spying combined with shoot-first, ask-the-UN-for-resolutions-later foreign-policy doctrines—will be continued by his replacement. Bush replaceable by Cheney? As the South Park boys would say: “America: fuck, yeah!”

In other words, Death of a President tells us little you don’t already know, which would make it sort of useless if it were a real documentary. As a horror movie, though, it’s completely gripping. Regardless of how you feel about Bush, his assassination would trigger massive and unpredictable consequences unlikely to make any of us feel safer. The movie shows that it could easily happen, that the innocent can be punished much more readily than the guilty, and that we should all sleep a bit less soundly at night. Thanks, Gabriel Range.