Steve McQueen’s portrait of the German bombing of the UK during the second World War opens with a shadowy shot of the Luftwaffe over the water. It’s as close as this fine home-fires drama comes to pyrotechnics.
McQueen’s extensively researched script alights on racism and looting, but at heart it’s a boy’s own adventure, replete with ragamuffins and Dickensian villains. It’s 1940, and George (Elliott Heffernan), a boy of mixed ethnicity, is being evacuated to the countryside. At Paddington station he rages against his mother, Rita (Saoirse Ronan). “I hate you,” he tells her, a tirade that pricks at his conscience and inspires him to jump off the train mid-journey.
As he makes his way home to his mother and grandfather (Paul Weller), he encounters other lost boys, a kindly Nigerian air warden (Benjamin Clementine) and a criminal gang headed by Stephen Graham’s Bill Sikes-style ne’er-do-well.
You can see the attention to detail in the busy bomb shelters and ruined interiors of the production designer Adam Stockhausen. McQueen’s pedigree as a Turner Prize-winning visual artist ensures that every shot is as aesthetically pleasing as it is authentic.
Blitz review: Saoirse Ronan has little to work with in Steve McQueen’s absorbing but crowded war-time drama
Piece by Piece review: Pharrell Williams’s life story, told through Lego. Kind of weird
The Piano Lesson review: Denzel Washington’s project is admirable, but this film can’t shake off its stage origins
Paddington in Peru review: Fine lessons wrapped up in fun and fur
That verisimilitude can make for a crowded picaresque. Blitz juggles musical numbers, a plot about women in munitions factories demanding that Tube stations open to Londoners during air raids, and notes on the black experience during the war.
The characters feel undercooked against this textured backdrop. Ronan has little to work with; Harris Dickinson, playing a young warden with a soft spot for Rita, has even less to go on. These thin sketches might well have benefitted from the space afforded Occupied City and the Small Axe series.
Blitz lacks the emotional heft of Hunger or the director’s Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave, but it’s an absorbing, reliable depiction of a much-mythologised historical moment.
In cinemas from Friday, November 8th, and on Apple TV+ from Friday, November 22nd
