Blitz review: this riveting World War II movie is one of the year’s best

There is a moment of chilling power midway through Steve McQueen’s new, Apple-produced World War II drama Blitz. The film, a Dickensian exploration of London during the Nazis’ devastating bombing campaign, keeps itself mostly at the sides of either Rita (Saoirse Ronan) or George (newcomer Elliott Heffernan), its separated mother and son leads, for much of its 2-hour runtime. But then, in the midst of it all, there is a sudden detour. McQueen and cinematographer Yorick Le Saux begin to glide through a glitzy London nightclub as its performers sing and dance and its patrons gossip, drink, and delight in each other’s company. Together, McQueen and Le Saux steadicam their way through the sequence, winding in and out of the club’s hallways and even briefly dipping into its kitchen before returning to its tables and main-floor guests.

The place is alight and alive with the sound of music, which McQueen repeatedly argues throughout Blitz is also the sound of life itself. But then the club’s band leader calls for quiet, and we hear them: the air raid sirens sounding. Everyone in the club looks up, fear suddenly etched on their faces, and as McQueen’s camera rises, we see them all go unnaturally still. They become humans paralyzed, trapped between the same single breath. The exhale comes shortly thereafter when McQueen cuts to another long, unbroken shot in a space jarringly devoid of light. He pans his camera long enough for us to realize that we are in the same nightclub again, now bombed to oblivion. Some of the patrons still sit in their seats — frozen forever in that same, held inhale.

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This is but one of several violent wartime events dramatized throughout Blitz, and McQueen, who both wrote and directed the film, does eventually connect his nightclub tangent back to Heffernan’s George. The manner in which he does is horrifying and almost cartoonishly ghoulish, and it involves a crew of grave-robbing villains — led by the psychotic Albert (Stephen Graham) — that feel, in their cruelty and willingness to loot London’s bombed homes and bodies, like they could have been plucked right out of Oliver Twist. There is something off-puttingly fantastical about them because they are seen through the eyes of George, a young biracial boy whose view of a world in which hellfire rains down every night and racism is present even in bomb shelters could only be exactly what Blitz is: whimsically heightened and yet terrifyingly brutal.

The film, McQueen’s first scripted feature effort since 2018’s Widows, has already received comparisons to Steven Spielberg’s movies, specifically 1987’s Empire of the Sun. This is due, in no small part, to its young protagonist and its blend of the fantastic and the gritty. Both aspects represent unexpected changes of pace for McQueen, a filmmaker who first made a name for himself directing unsparing adult dramas like Hunger, Shame, and 12 Years a Slave. At times, McQueen’s realist style does bristle incongruously against the purposefully childlike perspective of some of Blitz‘s scenes. In the second half of his career, however, McQueen has attempted to stretch his filmmaking prowess by continuing to explore the same heady themes of his earlier films in more straightforwardly entertaining genre works. He did so successfully in Widows, a gutsy crime thriller that flew frustratingly under the radar in 2018, and he’s done so again in Blitz.

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Unlike that film, which took a familiar potboiler premise and gave it a distinctly political, feminist perspective, Blitz tells a story that — on paper, at least — feels positively Spielbergian. It follows George, who decides to disobey his mother’s wish to evacuate him to the British countryside and away from the reach of the Germans’ bombs. Halfway through his ride away from London, George jumps from his train and sets off on a journey back to his mother and grandfather, Gerald (Paul Weller). His path proves to be a winding one full of dangerous close calls and chance encounters with characters who range from empathetic to conniving. At the same time, Ronan’s Rita, a wartime factory worker and single mother, is left searching for new ways to feel useful and helpful without a young boy to raise and protect. Her efforts lead her first to the pub for a girls’ night out with her friends, and then to an underground community shelter shared by those left homeless by the Blitz.

For Rita and her fellow adults, questions of purpose and survival permeate the very air they breathe. How do you adapt to a time when uncertainty is constant and sudden death is a possibility every night? What is the best way to spend one’s time when it feels like your world could end at any given moment? Blitz may be set over 80 years in the past, but these questions still resonate today, and McQueen makes the certainty of doom seem uncomfortably palpable throughout. Every one of the film’s chapters feels destined to end even when they have only just begun, and while most of Blitz‘s story is told through the eyes of its prepubescent protagonist, that doesn’t stop McQueen from repeatedly ripping George’s moments of respite and calm away from him. This approach creates a resulting atmosphere of tragedy and yearning that both unsettles and moves.

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Through George, McQueen finds ways to touch on some of the similar themes of institutional racism he’s explored in his previous films. The cause of his Black father’s absence is explained in one well-timed flashback, and McQueen pointedly spotlights in subsequent memories how this leaves George with only his white mother and grandfather as role models. When Blitz begins, he is so confused about his own identity that when he meets an empathetic Nigerian-British military policeman named Ife (a scene-stealing Benjamin Clementine) in one of the film’s best chapters, George isn’t sure whether or not he even identifies as Black. Why would he when — as McQueen showcases in one of the most brilliantly blocked sequences of his career — the only examples of Blackness that he can find are colored by his own country’s demeaning Imperialist perspective?

There are moments when the film’s ideas about racism and the Blitz itself don’t coalesce as seamlessly as one would like, but the ideas themselves are always compelling. When they do combine together effectively, they only further reinforce the sense that the viewer has been dropped into a hostile world. McQueen doesn’t just intellectually or thematically evoke that feeling, either. He also punctuates Blitz with some of the most pulse-pounding, virtuosic set pieces he’s ever constructed, including an escape George must make when the underground train station he’s taken refuge in is flooded with waves of nearby sea water. This sequence, which McQueen expertly builds to with a series of increasingly unnerving images, strikes the perfect balance of orchestrated chaos. You know what’s happening every single moment, and that only makes the instances when George is knocked backward by a rush of water all the more terrifying.

As yet another step up in budget and scale, Blitz gives McQueen the chance to prove yet again that he’s one of the most gifted visual craftsmen of his generation. Arresting images populate the film — from a point-of-view shot of George peeking through a boat’s cover to look up at the fiery, war-torn sky above him to a slow dissolve McQueen uses to briefly lay an aerial shot of London’s exploding cityscape over his young protagonist’s sleeping face. These visuals force you to not only admire the craft on display, but also think deeply about the choices Blitz is making throughout its 120 minutes. Not all of them work as well as others, but they all come together to consistently make Blitz just as thought-provoking as it is viscerally affecting. It’s a film that often leaves you, much like its many scrambling characters, holding your breath and anxiously waiting to see what happens next.

Blitz is now playing in select theaters and streaming on Apple TV+.