‘Blitz’ Offers a New Perspective on the World War II Movie

Early in his feature filmmaking career, the director Steve McQueen asserted himself as a master of extremes. He showed audiences the terrible withering of a hunger strike, the clench of sex addiction, the daily horrors of American slavery. He moved on to somewhat breezier climes for the dramatic thriller Widows, then to the loveliness and righteous glow of his Small Axe film series. Some softness entered the equation of McQueen’s work, though darkness still lapped at the edges. Cut through it all was McQueen’s moral insistence, a sense of instructive urgency.

In hindsight, it all seems a natural lead-up to McQueen’s Blitz, a World War II film that blends the alarming, visceral bluntness of the director’s earlier films with more traditional, almost storybook textures. The film, which screened at the New York Film Festival on Thursday following its London Film Festival premiere, may not be the tightly mechanical, high–minded work that some want from McQueen. But it is nonetheless distinctly his.

The film follows a mother, Rita (Saorise Ronan), and her son, George (Elliott Heffernan), as they endure a few days of the London Blitz, becoming untethered from one another as Nazi bombs rain down on a teeming, complex city. McQueen’s primary mission may simply be to tell the story of that harrowing ordeal. But he also operates with political purpose. Blitz narratives are not uncommon in film and television, many of them pip-pip, keep calm and carry on stories of people bearing up nobly during their darkest hour. Blitz seeks to give further nuance to our understanding of that time and place, to paint a more accurate mural.

George is the son of a white mother and a Black father, making him an outlier in his largely white East London neighborhood. McQueen lets the realities of that difference emerge gradually; it is plainly stated at times, yes, but otherwise we see it manifest as subtle slights, moments of disregard. George is not cared for by the strangers in his community as other 9-year-old boys might be. McQueen is careful to point out that 1941 London was not a city grandly unified by struggle; there were tensions along racial, economic, and political lines, exacerbated by deteriorating conditions.

Blitz is neither a feel-good movie about wartime London nor unrelentingly bleak. The film treads a meandering line, traversing between Spielbergian adventure marred by violence, Dickensian child-in-peril squalidness, and social survey—both dreamy and probing—that feels entirely McQueen’s. It’s a patchwork that doesn’t always stitch together neatly, but is compelling and wrenching as a whole. The film is also a mighty vision of chaos and fire, of music and movement, of a city churning to sustain itself.

George and Rita are at first separated by bitter choice. As the Luftwaffe bombing campaigns intensify, Rita makes the difficult decision to entrust her son to a government program that ferries children out of London and into the relative safety of the countryside. George is resistant to leave his Mum, as most 9-year-olds would be, and his defiance quickly leads him toward danger, sending him off on an Odyssean trek to reunite with his mother.

George’s fraught journey is episodic in structure. There is a sweet but ultimately tragic bit of communion with some other wayward boys—a brief and perhaps necessarily cruel gesture toward (and dismissal of) the schmaltzier, more obfuscating movie this could have been. An encounter with a Black air raid warden, Ife (Benjamin Clementine), pushes George into a new understanding of his identity. This is the movie’s most broadly pedagogical interlude, but the importance and relevance of its lesson is unignorable.

In some ways, Blitz is a children’s film, a bildungsroman about a little boy learning of the grace and harshness of the world. A veer into a Oliver Twist-ian vignette may strain the film’s credibility, but Blitz is otherwise a fascinating application of McQueen’s signature formal rigor to a hoary genre. Blitz does not always skirt cliché, which oftentimes seems deliberate. McQueen is not reinventing a formula, he is instead extending it, widening its embrace to be more inclusive, and thus more accurate.

Though the film was shot in late 2022 and early 2023, it is hard to watch Blitz and not see a terrible parallel. How could one not compare the film’s startling images of destruction, of families bombed and obliterated, to those coming out of Gaza every day? Blitz does not consider the politics of the greater war surrounding George, but it certainly argues that no child should have to endure what it has shown us.

Though staggering in its technical dimensions, McQueen’s film is more than mere war-is-hell spectacle. Blitz is guided, and animated, by a deep and abiding humanism. It operates with the conviction that the historical record, or at least film’s version of it, ought to reflect the true demographic variance and sprawl of a city, of a country, as it really was. McQueen has made a more than worthy entry to the canon of WWII films: grim and dazzling, shrewd in its balance of starkness and sentiment. At its close, Blitz isn’t exactly shattering or uplifting. It exists somewhere in the ragged and hopeful in-between—which is what, I suppose, we might call carrying on.