Angelina Jolie returns to the director’s chair with her latest feature, “Without Blood”. It’s the first film she has directed since her brilliant and in some ways underrated “First They Killed My Father”. That 2017 Khmer-language biographical thriller told the true story of a five-year-old boy who was seized and forced to train as a child soldier during the Khmer Rouge’s violent reign. It was a powerful and sobering film that deserved more recognition than it got.

Now Jolie takes on a much different project yet one with a similar sense of timeliness and urgency. Based on Alessandro Baricco’s 2002 novel of the same name, “Without Blood” had its world premiere in 2024 at the Toronto International Film Festival but is just getting a United States release. It tells a story about war, but not from the battlefield. Instead, the reckoning we witness happens in a restaurant, as two people sit at a table and bring the past to life.

Jolie begins her film with a harrowing sequence set in the aftermath of an anonymous war. Three armed men approach the home of a doctor named Roca (Alfredo Herrera). The doctor hides his young daughter under the floorboards and orders his teenage son to get out sight. The three men are led by Salinas (Juan Minujín), an embittered, vengeance-driven soldier who is still fighting the war in his mind. Salinas holds the doctor responsible for his brother’s death and he has brought along the brutish El Gurre (Mario Zaragoza) and 17-year-old Tito (Ariel Perez Lima) to ensure he has his revenge.

The ripple effect of that opening sequence can be felt throughout the entire film. And it culminates in a second confrontation of a much different kind. Many years later we’re introduced to Nina (Salma Hayek Pinault). She was the little girl hiding under the floorboards who witnessed a horror she would never forget. We meet her as she approaches a newspaper kiosk where a man (Demián Bichir) sells newspapers and lottery tickets. We learn that man is Tito, and Nina has come to meet him face-to-face.

The two make their way to a quiet table in the back of a restaurant where Nina reveals her identity to the surprisingly composed Tito. Nina calmly yet methodically shares how the actions of that fateful day forever altered her life. She talks about her difficult time at a girl’s school, her adoption by a pharmacist with a gambling problem, and her time in the custody of a wealthy yet corrupt count, who raised her till she was 14 and then married her.

The bulk of the movie takes place at that small warmly lit table with Jolie sometimes breaking away to tell Nina’s backstory via flashbacks. We see how she has existed in a world of powerful and violent men. Yet her strength and resilience has led her to this day. But Jolie also shines an interesting light on Tito, showing that the past events have left their marks on him as well. Their dynamic opens up some of the movie’s deepest themes including the very nature of trauma.

With “Without Blood”, Angelina Jolie once again tackles heavy subject matter with emotional honesty and keen sense of craft. She also smartly leans on Hayek and Bichir, two committed and capable actors working in just the right tenor. There’s a part of me that wishes Jolie had gone deeper. But at the same time it’s hard not to admire her restraint, which helps ground this visually arresting and emotionally layered meditation on war, trauma, and revenge.