In Ballistic, the sophomore feature from writer-director Chad Faust, a mother deals with the grief of losing her son by spiralling into conspiracies as she tries to find someone to blame.

Lena Headey plays Nancy, a munitions factory worker whose son is killed in Afghanistan. Unwilling to accept her son’s death, Nancy demands to see the bullet, hoping she can identify the gun that killed her son. When she learns the bullet is American-made, Nancy descends into “research” online, trying to explain to herself how the Taliban could have been supplied American munitions.

As Nancy connects the dots, she eventually blames the Taliban, the US government, herself, her boss, her son’s boss, and briefly a local Afghan therapist for the death of her son. None of these targets, of course, is actually to blame for her son’s death – at least not any more or less than just about anything else in society or in her son’s life. The unfortunate truth is that her son is a casualty of war. A war that Ballistic makes a compelling case is pointless, and cost him his life for basically nothing, but a war that he also willingly went into with the full support of the people around him.

Ballistic features some pointed social commentary, but Faust often moves too quickly between his targets. In the film’s best scene, Nancy threatens an Army recruiter (played by Faust himself) at gunpoint, blaming him directly for her son’s death, only to have the recruiter throw the blame right back at her. This powerful moment is somewhat undercut by Nancy seeing her therapist outside and quickly moving on from the recruiter.

As Nancy engages with different parts of the war machine, Faust repeatedly builds towards action scenes, “vengeance” clearly top of mind for Nancy. And yet Ballistic never indulges in any sort of revenge fantasy for its heroine. At the end of the day, Nancy is a grieving mother, and though Faust and Headey take that quite far, they remain firmly grounded in reality.

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Ballistic