Jake Mahaffy's hauntingly beautiful film is set in a rural America in ruins. Dilapidated barns and crumbling homes dot the desolate landscape, an architectural equivalent to the narrative's isolated characters. Made over four years with a hand-cranked movie camera in rural Pennsylvania, War features a desperate farmer, a ranting junkman, a reticent preacher, and an imaginative boy, all nonactors from Warren County, where the film was shot. Each carries on an interior monologue-sounds of an invisible war, biblical rants, or reminiscences of childhood on the farm. Throughout is the almost nonstop backdrop of religious radio, promising an unlikely salvation. Since the completion of the film, most of the locations it depicts have disappeared; Mahaffy notes, “This film archives the remnants and the present decline of an America which nothing will replace.” The melancholy images are a poetic reminder that the war of the title is being fought at home, leaving in its wake the death of the traditional family farm.