Joseph Cedar’s new film “Beaufort” coolly traces the conviction, loyalty, and consciousness-distorting contours of wartime with a forthright and supple narrative dexterity unseen in the war movie genre since Russian Elem Klimov’s mid-1980s World War II masterpiece “Come and See.”

Indeed, time, the protean physical foundation of storytelling itself, is what “Beaufort” is all about — specifically, what American troops in Vietnam anxiously nearing the end of their individual tours of duty referred to as “short time.” Organized warfare frequently saddles its warriors with a soul-sucking, sanity-testing period as the conclusion of a soldier’s active service — the result of retreat, rotation, or ongoing negotiation — draws tantalizingly near, even while the bullets keep on flying. For 132 minutes, “Beaufort,” which opens in the city today after making its New York premiere last week at the Jewish Film Festival, explores war’s trial-by-clock with haunting intensity, intelligence, and grace.

It’s the spring of 2000, and the Israeli Defense Forces’ hard-won, 18-year occupation of a mountain outpost in hostile Lebanon has reached its end. Named for a crumbling stronghold created during the Crusades with which it shares both real estate and ultimate fate, the IDF’s Beaufort is a jumble of concrete slabs, trenches, and heavily reinforced underground tunnels connecting a series of subterranean bunkers and cliffside viewing posts. Outside, Beaufort resembles the contents of a prefab concrete Stonehenge kit whose pieces have been laid out at random. Inside, the fort’s cramped warren of sandbags and corrugated metal is like the interior of some derelict submarine or crash-landed spacecraft.

“Incoming, incoming,” and then, “Impact, impact,” drones the voice of a soldier at the microphone of Beaufort’s heavily fortified command post as Hezbollah forces, emboldened by the scheduled withdrawal, redouble their missile and mortar shellacking of a hillside destined for self-destruction. But this acoustically enhanced play-by-play, suggesting a more sinister version of the broadcast background commentary in Robert Altman’s comparatively serene “M*A*S*H,” offers the soldiers who hear it more of an object lesson in redundant military powers of observation than a leg up on self-preservation.

Presiding over this harrowing day-to-day existence is Liraz (Oshri Cohen), an impossibly young commanding officer stretched so tightly between his assigned responsibilities and the manifold ironies of his and his men’s situation that, at times, it seems as if he may very well explode on his own. Orders come, men die, and Catch-22s multiply exponentially while Liraz presides over a duck-and-cover hilltop military fiefdom bound for history’s scrap heap. “I wanted to be here, that’s the mistake,” Liraz tells a visiting bomb-squad expert named Ziv (Ohad Knoller), grappling with his own sense of duty and intimations of mortality. Liraz and his men’s job is, he deadpans, to “guard the mountain so it doesn’t escape.” In this and other rueful exchanges, Mr. Cohen’s Liraz marries combat-weary cynicism to self-sustaining macho zeal with a potent, flinty awkwardness that borders on documentary realism.

Based upon veteran Israeli war correspondent Ron Leshem’s novel (Mr. Leshem also co-adapted his book), “Beaufort” offers, for plot, only the gruesomely unforgiving incidental cause and effect of combat. The film deftly harnesses the high-risk routines of what is, for all intents and purposes, a strategically mandated siege in order to examine the nature of leadership and citizenship under fire at an unusually personal and bracingly unheroic level. “Where did that come from?” the soldiers of “Beaufort” frequently demand to know as they lose their cool, make mistakes, or try one another’s patience to the breaking point. Sure, these guys have shared stories and secrets about their lives before the IDF and dreams beyond, but in the throes of moment-to-moment survival, their bonds transcend heroism, sacrifice, and all the other lofty terms chipped into statue pedestals and printed on commendations.

There is, “Beaufort” suggests, no more intimate act among human beings than the shared struggle to keep from getting killed, and to keep from being undone by the deaths of those who aren’t so fortunate.

And yet, even while clinically dissecting and isolating the potentially fatal fear lurking inside Liraz, as much if not more than his subordinates, Mr. Cedar stages and photographs “Beaufort” in an equally unrelenting pursuit of physical beauty and smuggled epiphany. Silhouetted against the high desert sun, the soldiers’ helmets, topped with ballooning camouflage covers that make them appear like derelict modern-dress Medicis, the fort’s defenders seem as enthralled by the past they are, in a sense, repeating, as by the present they’re barely enduring. Blessed with almost supernaturally resonant visual tempos and an eerily effective, minimalist, and ubiquitous music score, “Beaufort” is one of those once-in-a-decade war pictures that reminds us what’s worthwhile about putting the ritualized barbarism of combat onscreen in the first place.