Hell and Back Again.

 Hell and Back Again is releasing on October 5, 2011

As the Afghan war neared a decade’s worth of combat, casualties and headlines, the photographer and filmmaker Danfung Dennis was looking to jolt people’s consciousness.

“I was frustrated with photojournalism, and I was frustrated with society back in the U.S. being indifferent to the war,” said Mr. Dennis, who had covered Afghanistan as a still photographer in 2006. “I moved into video and new media to try to shake people up — to show the war’s brutal reality in an honest way.”

Did he ever. “Hell and Back Again,” his new award-winning documentary film about the war, is a tour de force that breaks new ground in the documentary tradition, combining chilling reportage with sometimes dreamy or drugged-up sequences. The film — with clinical precision — peels away the daily headlines to expose the reality of the Afghan war and the devastating burden carried by American service members back home.

In July 2009, Mr. Dennis spent four weeks in Helmand Province with Company E, Second Battalsion, Eighth Marines, as they fought village to village as part of the largest air assault since the Vietnam War. The film opens with a Hollywood-style scene: an inspirational speech by a Marine commander and stunning shots of helicopters flying into battle. Then the real war begins: a terrifying, chaotic battle sequence that ends in the death of a Marine, Lance Corporal Sharp. (Mr. Dennis asked Lance Corporal Sharp’s family for permission to use the images, and they granted it without viewing the footage).

More astonishing battle sequences follow, capturing the horror and futility of the Afghan conflict in a way that mainstream filmmakers never will. The Marines fight day after day against an unseen enemy, seemingly making little headway. They deliver good-will speeches to local leaders who stare blankly, then ask, “If you really want to help us, why don’t you leave?” An Afghan boy flees from his village in the midst of a firefight the American presence has provoked, looking back toward the camera and calmly blowing a bubble as bullets hiss past.

Virtually ensuring that “Hell and Back Again” will never see widespread release, Mr. Dennis graphically depicts an Afghan soldier — cut in half by a mine — being lifted into a body bag as his corpse disintegrates in front of the camera. It is an image myself and other combat cameramen have seen repeatedly, yet never been able to convey to the American public.

Mr. Dennis says it was a difficult decision to include it in “Hell and Back Again.” “We felt in the end it was important not to sugarcoat the war,” he said. “We did not want to match the romantic, false representation of war that is out there.”

Yet these scenes are but a prelude for the greater, more lingering conflict he chronicles. At the heart of the film is the struggle of Sgt. Nathan Harris, a member of Company E, once he returns to the home front. After a bullet tears through his leg near the end of this, his third tour in Afghanistan, the 26-year-old sergeant returns to North Carolina and is ensnared in a nightmare of nauseating pain, addictive opiates and ever-present handguns.

The filmmaker was back in the United States when Sergeant Harris was wounded and did not learn of his injuries until he greeted the Marines as they returned home.

“He invited me to his home and introduced me to his friends and family,” said Mr. Dennis, explaining how the film became focused on Sergeant Harris. “I lived with him, and the story became about one Marine and his life.”

In a surreal tracking shot that sets the tone for much to come, Mr. Dennis follows Sergeant Harris into a local shopping mall. American families shop obliviously in the aisles of an garishly lit megastore as Mr. Harris, framed by enormous TV screens, longingly studies a video game portraying war.

“I’m stressed out,” says Sergeant Harris, echoing a sentiment the filmmaker, suffering from combat stress, says he shared. “This makes me want to lose my mind. I would rather be in Afghanistan where things are simple. It’s more difficult coming home and dealing with all this …”

In scene after scene, zonked on a Ziploc full of medications, in searing pain and heavily armed, Sergeant Harris lurches from one medical appointment to another, brandishing guns, showing his scars to passers-by and conducting himself with equal measures of stoicism and boorishness.

“He was sometimes a tough character to like,” Mr. Dennis admits. “He was trained by his father from early age to be Marine — to shoot, to run long distances; he was groomed to be a warrior.”

Sergeant Harris’s young wife, Ashley, tenderly dresses her husband and shepherds him through his days. Yet in one jarring scene, an enraged Sergeant Harris threatens her with a gun. In another unexplained image — one flashed onscreen for just a moment — he is shown with his weapon in his mouth. These scenes raise questions about the filmmaker’s obligation to intervene. Yet Mr. Dennis, who had been led into battle by Sergeant Harris, seems secure in his refusal to do so.

“The scene where he put the gun in his mouth — that was one moment,” said Mr. Dennis. “For me, it was one image, there was no scene to build, no sequence.” The sergeant, he said, “did nothing I felt was putting himself or others at risk. I trusted him.”

In an interview from his home at Camp Lejeune, N.C., where he was preparing to come to New York City for the film’s premiere, Sergeant Harris praised the film but took exception with several scenes.

“There are a couple things that are out of context because you don’t see the beginning or the end — just a short glimpse into the situation,” he said. ”The gun scene is one of those.”

If there is another filmmaker alive who is has the combination of combat experience, bravery and technical chops to equal Mr. Dennis, I’m not aware of him or her. “Hell and Back Again” stacks one astonishing shot atop the next: perfectly composed tracking sequences in the heat of battle; saturated moody low-light compositions in rainy North Carolina parking lots; gorgeous rich soundscapes.

The emotional intensity of Sergeant Harris’s story is underscored by the film’s relentless cutting back and forth between scenes of the Marine fighting in Afghanistan and his struggles Stateside. That mirroring is masterfully achieved by Mr. Dennis’s editor Fiona Otway, who also edited James Longley’s wonderful “Iraq in Fragments.” Her eye and pacing are crucial to “Hell and Back Again” as well.

Mr. Dennis apparently came to the conclusion that it was not enough to simply create perfect compositions as he sprinted through fields with people firing machine guns at him—he decided to shoot the entire film at f2.8 as well, using a Canon 5D Mark II. At maximum aperture, Mr. Dennis’s depth of field on his 24-70 zoom lens was reduced to inches. Yet Mr. Dennis pulls off one virtuoso shot after another — images that will make Hollywood cinematographers swoon.

The result sometimes bears a startling resemblance to the work of Terrence Malick: dense, atmospheric, at times dreamy and technically impeccable. Its visual impact earned it the cinematography prize, as well as the Grand Jury Prize, at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Yet this virtuosity almost refutes the hard grit of documentaries like “Harlan County, U.S.A.,” and something feels lost. Every shadow is revealed, and “Hell and Back” takes on a cold, clinical tone. The protagonist’s pain, as well as a surreal sense of dislocation, is well established. What is not is a strong emotional connection to the Sergeant Harris.

It is hard to see the film and not make comparisons to Restrepo, the other masterpiece of the Afghan war. Restrepo, too, shows the war’s devastating effect on soldiers’ lives, yet it is suffused with warmth and love.

Mr. Dennis spent a year with Sgt. Harris and his wife, and certainly he could have chosen to tell many stories with his footage.  The one he settled upon in “Hell and Back Again” gives the viewer nothing back; one leaves empty, frustrated at the wait for redemption that never comes.  This hard, cold film feels much like the distant war that has gone on for 10 years with little payoff.