Certainly the last thing anyone needed was another Hunger Games movie. We’ve already had four of them: sturdy adaptations of the young adult novel trilogy by Suzanne Collins, a dystopian phenomenon that addressed the rattled temper of a post-9/11 America terribly inured to war. Four is probably enough, as many other tired franchises that have limped on well past their primes have shown us.

Then again, we are once again (or, rather, still are) living in an era gripped by violent conflict, in which news of some fresh horror of mortal destruction arrives every day alongside weather reports and sports recaps. So maybe we have not, in fact, evolved past The Hunger Games. Enter, then, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, an adaptation of Collins’s Hunger Games prequel, which travels back some 65 years on the timeline to tell a harrowing story from the early days of the titular games—gladiatorial combat into which children are conscripted—in order to tell us something about the present.

Directed by Francis Lawrence, who made three of the four original Hunger Games movies, Songbirds may indeed do just that. There’s an awful relevance to the film, which looks at the mechanics of occupation and reprisal through a decidedly sinister, despairing lens. We know that no hope will be gleaned from the end of the film—we’ve already seen what life will be like for the beleaguered folks of the work camp districts despotically controlled by an all-powerful Capitol. And yet, the grim conclusions of Songbirds are still a mighty jolt; the film is, maybe, instructive in all its bleakness. 

The hero of the film, if you can call him that, is Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth), who later becomes the ruthless president of all of Panem, the America-like country (perhaps it’s a post-America) where the Hunger Games saga lays its scene. Songbirds is a prelude to villainy, and yet is nonetheless successful in making us care about a teenage Snow as he tries to climb the governmental ladder, hoping to rescue his family from penury. Songbirds is the rare intelligent, useful prequel; its origin story (or, really, stories) actually do better elucidate what we’ve already seen. 

The Hunger Games, designed to punish district residents for a nasty revolt against the Capitol, are only in their 10th year, and are a decidedly more raggedy affair than what we’ve seen Jennifer Lawrence scrape her way through.  The tributes, as the contestants are called, are not feted and costumed as they will someday be. They are quite literally treated like zoo animals, gawked and jeered at before they’re unceremoniously dumped into a shabby arena stocked with rusty weapons and made to fight to the death. Ratings for the Games are flagging, threatening their existence, much to the displeasure of their cracked overseer, Voluminia Gaul (Viola Davis). Things begin to change when Coriolanus and his fellow university students are tasked with mentoring the players, molding their images and, in so doing, perhaps creating celebrities. (Maybe this is all a metaphor for Hollywood?) 

Wouldn’t you know that Snow’s mentee is a beautiful young woman about his age, Lucy Gray (Rachel Zegler), a traveling singer who speaks in an Appalachian twang and has a folksy mettle utterly foreign to Snow. They form an instant bond, and one suspects that the narrative of Songbirds will be Snow realizing the humanity of all the tributes through his dawning affection for Lucy Gray, thus rejecting the Capitol’s stern social order. But, again, Snow is eventually the bad guy, murderously devoted to the Capitol. Songbirds instead offers a tricky kind of moral journey, one with no happy ending waiting on the other side. 

Songbirds is part action movie, part espionage thriller, told in three parts over the course of some two hours and forty minutes. Those epic dimensions are earned through shrewd pacing and compelling performances. Zegler may not have much of a character to play—she represents, for the most part, righteous and tenacious Good—but she does a lot with thin characterization. Blyth keenly renders the push and pull of Snow’s warring allegiances, decency clashing so terribly against ambition. Davis is a scenery-chewing hoot as a mad scientist, while Jason Schwartzman is appropriately smarmy and vile as an ancestor of Stanley Tucci’s TV presenter character from the original films. 

Francis Lawrence is adept at both harrowing action and moments of pensive, fraught quiet. He persuasively establishes the emotional and political stakes of this world, which has always existed on the edge of absurdity. It proves surprisingly hard to roll one’s eyes at Songbirds, so vivid are its danger, its dread, its reflections of our own world of brutal occupations and, essentially, child sacrifice. Songbirds is a gloomy sit, but it is also confident entertainment, a studio cash-in that justifies its making through thoughtful applications of tone and texture. It is possible, the movie suggests, to do something as cynical as a franchise prequel with care and insight, to further expand on intellectual property in ways that actually enrich the original product. Perhaps it is a sign of our sorry times that it comes as a welcome to relief to have our soylent served up so nicely.