People turned food into an industry more than a hundred years ago, an arrangement with science and business that an increasing number of voices are now warning us to reconsider, if not fully revise. Fast Food Nation, the recently released movie, is the latest popular manifestation of the argument, a big-budget version of a best-selling book.

Also being released in the States this month, though, is Our Daily Bread, a so-called “silent” movie made by Austrian filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter on the manufacturing of food in Western Europe.

Geyrhalter is one of the most subtle of unsubtle filmmakers. His topics are outsized and chilling. He’s best known as the director of Pripyat, for example, the award-winning documentary about a town near Chernobyl, site of the worst nuclear accident in history. Geyrhalter let his camera simply linger on the townspeople there, watching them contemplate the enormity of the disaster, its epic consequences. As director he felt no need to comment. The facts and the camera did the work.

Our Daily Bread takes this approach to the extreme. It’s being called “silent” not because there is no sound but because there are no words. In fact, the sounds in the movie are as powerful as any dialogue that could possibly have accompanied the images.

Geyrhalter takes us to dairy farms, vegetable fields and cattle ranches, introducing us to a world of chemical treatments, whirring machinery and steaming guts. Although not as overtly political as Fast Food Nation, the precise filming technique and lack of narration underlines the director’s true topic: the nature of industrial life— the efficiency on one hand and the coldness on the other.

Over the constant humming of machines, sounds of the natural world come through. A slaughtered cow is hung upside down, blood rushing from its nose and splashing onto the floor. Young pigs are placed on their backs in metal cuffs while women handlers appear to snip off the tails. The pigs cry hysterically the entire time.

One of the most unsettling visual elements of the film is the expressionlessness of the faces of the men and women involved. Many of them chew gum as they blankly slice open bodies and separate guts.

These images are particularly disturbing because they force the viewer to self-examine. The film doesn’t make out the workers as villains. We understand that they are an integral part of the process that brings food to our tables. The methodical way they do their jobs illustrates a larger issue.

Geyrhalter has said there was a general wariness on the part of food companies to grant him access, that there was a justifiable low-level fear of scandal among executives. Exposing incompetence, however, was never his aim. On the contrary, he says, the places in the film were amazingly well run, which he thinks is the thing best to contemplate.

“If you believe there’s any scandal on display here, then you have to think it through,” he says. “If there’s a scandal, it’s how we live, because the economic, ’soulless’ efficiency [of the places in the film] is in a reciprocal relationship with our society’s lifestyle. What makes the topic fascinating is the machinery and the sense of what’s doable, the human spirit of invention and organization… There’s nothing wrong with saying, ‘Buy organic products! Eat less meat!’ But at the same time it’s a kind of excuse, because we all enjoy the fruits of automation and industrialization and globalization every day, which affect much more than just food.”

We have made it possible to live disconnected from the forces of production across industries, including the industry that puts food on our tables. Whatever your discomfort with that industry, this is what it looks like.

Our Daily Bread has won awards at various international film festivals. It opens in the U.S. in limited release on November 24.

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Sabrina Ford is a freelance journalist who has contributed to national outlets including Wired magazine and National Public Radio. She lives in New York.