The last time the big silver screen saw British director
Steve McQueen following his 2013 Best Picture win for 12 Years a Slave,
he made ostensibly his first B-movie in 2018 with the genre thriller Widows. Though fully written and directed by McQueen
with his stylistic flourishes all over it, it felt like a day off for the
ordinarily searing provocateur behind Hunger and Shame. In the years in between, McQueen also
directed the television movie anthology series the Small Axe films and
the documentary series Uprising before embarking on the theatrical
documentary film Occupied City concerning Amsterdam under Nazi
occupation during World War II in 2023.
It is not at all surprising McQueen would follow up Occupied City
with the Apple TV+ original film Blitz a year later, all but dramatizing
many of the events documented in his last film.
Centered around the Blitzkrieg German bombing campaign against England from September 7th 1940 to May 11th 1941, Blitz follows white Londoner Rita (Saoirse Ronan) and her mixed race young son George (Elliott Heffernan) who live together with her father Gerald (Paul Weller) in a racially divided United Kingdom. When the bombings start, by now a routine of going into underground tunnels waiting for it to stop before returning to the surface to see what’s left, she sends him off amongst other children being evacuated from the city via railway train. A tough, defiant young lad, George aborts the train mid journey and embarks on a treacherous travelogue back into war-torn Britain trying desperately to find his mother. Meanwhile Rita, working in a factory with other women trying to support the war effort, learns of George’s escape and finds herself wading through broken buildings and dangerous alleyways searching tirelessly for her frightened lone son.
An extended endurance of terror, helplessness and horror featuring maybe the most Krzysztof Penderecki sounding score of Hans Zimmer’s entire career and chilly yet polished half-lit cinematography by recurring Luca Guadagnino collaborator Yorick Le Saux, Blitz though PG-13 unlike some of McQueen’s prior R or NC-17 features is a searing brutalization. Though non-linear as it leaps freely from Rita and George’s perspectives reflecting on their pasts that led them to where they are, including Rita’s then-frowned upon relationship with a black man and George’s own inescapability as an outsider amongst his fellow Britains, the film is fairly straightforward about the Hell it intends to wring you through. From here, it becomes episodic in nature as George saunters from one harrowing encounter after the next. Briefly he finds respite and solace in a black soldier named Ife (musician Benjamine Clementine) only to find horror again in nefarious pickpocket Albert (a terrifying Stephen Graham).
Saiorse Ronan as the mortified yet fierce mother Rita trying to protect her son not knowing he’s making a cross-country effort to make it back home is wonderful as always in a role tailor made for her. Newcomer Elliott Heffernan as the young lad George has a lot to shoulder with this film, including running through nerve wracking collapsable set pieces in ruin or frightening encounters with criminals and/or racists. Benjamin Clementine’s brief appearance as a black soldier who sees a bit of himself in the frightened boy who briefly becomes something of a surrogate father figure. And of course there’s Stephen Graham’s formidable turn as a character who could well cause great harm to our little hero.
With an impending theatrical release on November 1st followed by a streaming rollout on Apple TV+ on November 22nd, Steve McQueen’s first feature in six years is a powerfully draining WWII film less focused on the logistics of warfare than how people had to navigate from spot to spot in order to avoid being struck by firepower. Seen through the eyes of a child only amplifies the unfathomable horrors unfolding all around him and for awhile we become the boy and share in his fear and homesickness. The most overtly British McQueen effort since Hunger and his first real war film, Blitz is the kind of film you don’t sit down for so much as you buckle up fastening your seatbelt. A draining and at times numbing experience, Blitz is heavy but not without reason as it points to the human lives just trying to live on in an extended theater of death and destruction.
--Andrew Kotwicki