Abbass carries the argument Atonement only claims to make

Atonement is a film about culpability that knows exactly what it believes about U. S. imperial violence before the characters do. The review frames this as psychological astuteness — as if the movie has earned a moral position through the specificity of its people. It hasn't, and that gap between the film's editorial confidence and the actual work happening on screen is where the whole argument either survives or collapses.

The prevailing read treats "bullets fire both ways" as a statement about moral complexity. It isn't. It's a rhetorical gesture toward balance that the film never actually investigates in its scenes. What the film does instead is assign positions: Abbass's character must embody regret, must see the cost, must undergo a reckoning about American power. Whether she discovers this or simply performs what the screenplay insists she believe is the only question that matters.

Take the moment — if it exists. Where her moral position actually shifts because of something she learns, something she witnesses, something that fractures her prior conviction. The review doesn't name it. That absence is instructive. When a film has earned its argument through character, critics can point to the scene where the character changes. They can say: here, this moment, this is where she knows. Instead we get the assurance that she's psychologically astute, that the film is intimate, that the human cost is shown. None of those claims require the performance to do anything specific.

Boyd Holbrook's presence complicates this further. Not because the film examines what the two of them might genuinely believe about the violence they're witnessing. Because his character exists as the embodiment of the opposite position. He's the soldier, the implement, the other side of the "both ways." A film that earned its critique would show these two characters in genuine disagreement, would let that disagreement matter, would risk that one of them might be right in ways the other isn't. Instead Holbrook's role becomes the film's permission structure: see, we showed both sides, therefore we're balanced, therefore our position is earned.

The difference between ideology and character is whether the reckoning feels necessary or assigned. A performance can carry that weight. Abbass is capable of making you believe in a genuine moral reckoning, one that costs her something and changes her. But the film has to let her. The review, by never specifying how that happens or pointing to a scene where it does, suggests the film doesn't.