For those who have difficulty holding two or more contradictory ideas at the same time—how one thing can be true but not another—your head is about to explode watching the labyrinthine Enemies of the State. With all due respect to onscreen defense attorney Michael Terry, there are more than two explanations behind the motivations of devoted parents, Paul and Leann DeHart, and their adult son, Matt, who for years was investigated by the U.S. government for online espionage.

The son of two Air Force officers, Matt served in the Air National Guard, was honorably discharged, and as a civilian set up a server, what he called “the shell,” on the dark web. There, he allegedly hosted classified information obtained from military sources. He claims to have deleted them from the server and to have stored them on two USB sticks. What exactly they contained becomes one of the many issues that remains up in the air. His mother claims to have seen the secret files, but the filmmakers maintain their focus on the family’s cat-and-mouse legal travails and not whether her theory about this digital MacGuffin checks out.

Adding to the murkiness of the many unfolding mysteries is the total lack of the cooperation by the FBI, just one of the governmental agencies targeting Matt. However, as a few of the interviewees point out, Matt’s actions are not exactly those of a whistleblower, given that the information in question has yet to be publicly disclosed by him or an organization like Wikileaks.

As a result, the outcome is less about digital espionage, as in Laura Poitras’s Citizenfour on Edward Snowden, or a delving into possible war crimes (Dan Krauss’s The Kill Team), although Leann and Paul charge that Matt was held and tortured by the FBI while he was detained in Maine and framed on child pornography charges in Tennessee. Instead, director Sonia Kennebeck has crafted a portrait of a Midwest, tight-knit religious clan.

Yet it is the portrayal of the DeHarts that fascinates and frustrates a bit. They are aware that they do not fit a typical image of political activists taking on the U.S. government. Much of the movie’s allure is founded on this contradiction of two parents, who served in the military as linguists during the Cold War, and a son, who served in the Air National Guard’s drone program, who felt compelled to seek asylum in Canada under the U.N. Convention Against Torture. Even when Paul and Leann move away from suburban Indiana to an undisclosed rural location, the father points to a distant helicopter, wondering if he and his wife are under surveillance. The Three Days of the Condor–type of paranoia is played up in the thriller-like pace.

The family’s portrait is not quite well rounded, though Paul and Leann come across as never less than candid. Paul became an ordained minister after his early retirement from the military, yet his denomination is never mentioned. Toward the end, Terry, the attorney, describes Paul as a fundamentalist—he’s affiliated with the Church of Christ. Given what happens, the entire family’s belief system undergoes a grueling test. What we see of the DeHarts is a generalized picture. How their faith played into their actions is left off screen, though the film highlights its importance in a scene with actors, as the family, praying at the dinner table. Presumably, the director was able to get only so much cooperation from the parents. Toward the conclusion of Enemies’ time line, they virtually disappear from the narrative.

The film bears the stamp of Errol Morris, one of its executive producers, with its piling on of layers and layers of ambiguity as well as its reliance on creative reenactments of the multiple legal proceedings, which accompany the hearings’ original audio recordings. Kennebeck has found dead-ringers for the family members, so much so that initially it is unclear what is a home video and what was made for the film. These segments are seamlessly interwoven into the flow of talking heads and give the film a visual spark, but do add some confusion.

Enemies of the State has a strong appeal for those into true-crime series and who crave a more concise accounting, rather than the drawn-out limited series now in vogue, though it could use more padding. Still, the film convincingly backs the assertion of Carrie Daughtrey, U.S. assistant attorney, Middle District of Tennessee, when she describes her part in the DeHart matter as “one of the most unusual cases I ever handled.”