Starring Paul Gross and Rossif Sutherland. Rated 14A.

Writer-director-star Paul Gross spent a lot of time over in Afghanistan as he prepared to make Hyena Road, and the verisimilitude of its combat sequences, both on the ground and back at command centre, is one of the payoffs. When an IED discharges to tooth-rattling effect on a remote road in one early sequence, leaving behind a monster-sized and very real crater, Hyena Road swiftly addresses whatever compromised expectations we have going in about a Canadian war film with international aspirations.

In contrast to 2008’s Passchendaele, Gross now has the chops to match his ambition, and the impressively realized Hyena Road is both richer and poorer for it. The human drama here swirls around intelligence officer Pete (Gross), who taps primo sniper Ryan (Rossif Sutherland) for a tricky op designed to bring legendary mujahedeen fighter “the Ghost” into conflict with a CIA–protected gangster. Ryan’s affair with a fellow officer played by Christine Horne is one subplot too many, and the dialogue zings in a way that only happens in the movies, but something momentous occurs when the Ghost shows up on-screen.

Played almost silently by magnetic Afghan nonactor Niamatullah Arghandabi—a former warrior working these days as a government policy adviser—the Ghost sends Hyena Road soaring into another dimension entirely, especially when he uses something like dark magic to save Ryan’s ass from a horde of insurgents. It’s a spell that lingers for the rest of the two-hour picture, and after.

While some of the performances suffer in the shadow of Arghandabi’s insane charisma—Sutherland’s goombah accent, for one thing, is more suggestive of the Bronx than, say, Guelph—Hyena Road overcomes this and other deficits to close in on a genuinely gripping third act.

As for the film’s politics, the bottom line is that nobody turns conflict into entertainment because they want to lose money, while an unwanted coda is too gooey in its effort to explain why we’re there. (Some might say no why is good enough.)

On the other hand, Gross bases the film’s biggest villain on Wali Karzai, a man who used U.S. cover to become an Afghan version of Scarface. This suggests that Hyena Road is a little more frosty about a “war” clouded in obfuscation than you might think.