Wartime has always had a prominent place onscreen. Less prominent are films that tackle the aftermath of war. Movies like The Deer Hunter and The Best Years of Our Lives show the difficult transition back home after the battlefield. Even rarer is a film like Atonement, the feature debut for director Reed Van Dyk, which sees the returning soldier battling his own demons while coming face-to-face with people whose lives were devastated by his actions. 

Based on a New Yorker article from Dexter Filkins, Atonement follows Second lieutenant Lou D’Alessandro (Lu Lobello, in real life) who, during a firefight at the beginning of the invasion of Iraq, shoots on cars crossing at an intersection, killing three men in the multigenerational Khachaturian family (Kachadoorian, in real life), Iraqi civilians trying to find shelter after an explosion destroyed parts of their home. Back in the United States, the Marine, who is suffering from PTSD and panic attacks, finds out that some of the surviving Khachaturians immigrated to the United States and reaches out to meet them, with the hope of finding forgiveness.

Van Dyk read Filkins’ original story while in his Los Angeles apartment. “I couldn’t stop crying,” he says, but adds, “I was in no position at that time to make a movie.” He later went to UCLA for film school and made several short films, one of which, DeKalb Elementary, received an Oscar nomination in 2018. He often thought about the soldier and the Kachadoorians, and “when I had anybody to support and help me figure out how to make a feature, I asked.”

Determined to make it his feature directorial debut, it was important for Van Dyk to reach out to the real people at the center of the story. “I didn’t want to open up these old wounds for them without being certain that I was wanting to breathe life into this as a film.” He flew out to New York to have dinner with Filkins and drove to Las Vegas to sit with Lobello. He came to know the Kachadoorians best, as they lived only 20 minutes from each other in Los Angeles. Says the filmmaker: “It was a beautiful process of, over years, talking to them, getting their blessing.” 

Van Dyk placed a particular importance on realizing early invasion Baghdad. The city onscreen so often acts as, he says, “backdrop for American stories.” He and his cinematographer traveled to Baghdad for a scouting trip, with a reading list from Iraqi authors. The six-hour documentary from Abbas Fahdel, Homeland: Iraq Year Zero, was a principal source.  

The director also spoke with Marines to bring authenticity to the film’s central firefight, avoiding Hollywood’s well-worn battlefield stereotypes. These, says the director, can look more akin to a sporting events where “it is their side, our side. Who’s up and who’s down.” He focused instead on just the Americans pulling the trigger, intending for the sequence to hue closer to a documentary. Or, at the very least, “closer to the truth than I’m accustomed to seeing in movies, where Iraqis are often looked at through the sniper scope.”

As for casting, Van Dyk was not familiar with Boyd Holbrook’s best-known work, like the Marvel movie Logan, and the long-running Netflix series Narcos. Instead, he first clocked Holbrook in a small role in Jeff Nichols’ motorcycle period piece The Bikeriders. “I left the theater talking about him. I said, ‘I saw that guy in an Indiana Jones movie [Dial of Destiny] and he was nothing like he was in that.’ ” Shortly after, the director saw Holbrook playing Johnny Cash in the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, and was astounded by the actor’s range. Says Van Dyk: “I was just like, ‘This guy can do anything.’ He’s a character and really puts his shoulder into finding the body and movement and voice of that person.”

He was confident that Holbrook, who is prolific but often cast as a supporting character, could carry this film. 

For his part, Holbrook was drawn to Van Dyk’s more nuanced perspective on a wartime film. “We see so many monetized versions of war. This is something that you never get to see,” says the actor. Ultimately, he was drawn to Lou’s search for absolution: “I’m going to, face to face, meet these people and put myself aside.”

The role was physically daunting. First there was the firefight, which was shot on location in Jordan, which doubled for Iraq. Holbrook wore 40 pounds of gear in over 100-degree heat. But, he says, the awkwardness and discomfort lent to the practicalities of war that the filmmakers were hoping to capture. “It was not, ‘I’m going to look like a cool soldier.’ That’s the whole antithesis of the vibe that Reed wanted.”

Van Dyk pushed to have the Jordan sequences film first, allowing Holbrook to draw on those scenes for the second half of the film that sees Lou back in the United States, struggling with the memories he has from Iraq, plagued by panic attacks. 

Holbrook, who signed on to the film only two months before shooting began, thought, “I’m not going to be able to fake a panic attack.” He prepped breath work that would “kick in this diaphragm thing,” working himself up to the point where it felt like he was having a panic attack, and would sustain. He remembers sustaining what felt like an attack for over two hours, saying, “I got into such a place that I couldn’t control what I was physically going through.”

Says Van Dyk, “When you have an actor committed in this way, where the body more than the mind is believing the circumstances of the story, my job in that case is to try to move through the scene as quickly as we can and stay out of his way.” 

Opposite Holbrook is Palestinian actress Hiam Abbass, playing the matriarch of the Khachaturian family, with whom Lou has the climactic meeting. “I wanted to do the actor-y thing and not meet her until Lou met her [in the script],” says Holbrook of trying to avoid Abbass. But they were filming in Jordan at the same time and decided it was best they got to know each other. “I was so happy that I did, because I’ve got to understand her and her story, so when it came time to do our big scene, we didn’t need any rehearsal.”

Like in the original New Yorker story, Atonement builds to the meeting between Lou and the surviving Khachaturians, a potent mix of unrealized emotion and catharsis. The Hollywood Reporter review of the film, which premiered in Directors’ Fortnight, singled out the scene: “Abbass gives a master class in less-is-more restraint in these scenes, her character’s fortitude severely challenged but unbroken by her years of suffering.” Meanwhile, Holbrook is “a bundle of exposed nerves as he reckons with his own guilt and with the tremendous weight of grief and anger on the Iraqi family.”

Atonement’s aim to show an atypical onscreen depiction of war and its aftermath is realized in this moment. 

Says Van Dyk: “There’s something that was really profound about two people on opposite sides of a war coming together in a living room and, almost in spite of themselves, reaching for each other.”