FilmReview

Blitz review: Saoirse Ronan has little to work with in Steve McQueen’s absorbing but crowded war-time drama

Steve McQueen’s extensively researched script alights on racism and looting, but at heart is a boy’s own adventure

Saoirse Ronan as Rita in Steve McQueen's Blitz
Saoirse Ronan as Rita in Steve McQueen's Blitz
Blitz
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Director: Steve McQueen
Cert: 12A
Genre: Drama
Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Harris Dickinson, Elliott Heffernan, Benjamin Clementine, Kathy Burke, Paul Weller, Stephen Graham, Erin Kellyman
Running Time: 2 hrs 1 min

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.

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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.

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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 benefited 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

Tara Brady

Tara Brady

Tara Brady, a contributor to The Irish Times, is a writer and film critic