Blitz review: Steve McQueen’s wartime drama is a monumental achievement in British cinema

Earlier this year, the British filmmaker Steve McQueen released Occupied City, a four-hour documentary companion to his partner Bianca Stigter’s book Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940-1945. Building by building, street by street, it mapped out its stories of fascistic brutality and brave resistance, presenting those same places as they appear to us today. Its point was simple, but deeply effective: we are surrounded and consumed by history, and blind to it only by our own folly. Time and time again, it circles back to look us in the eye.

Blitz, McQueen’s fifth feature after Hunger, Shame, 12 Years a Slave and Widows, builds on those ideas until they swell into a symphony. It’s a war picture, in the more conventional mould, that feels new and revelatory purely because it’s being viewed through the eyes of its singular director – expressionist yet rarely sentimental, disquieting in its terrors yet tender in its hope, and profoundly interested in the ordinary lives of others.

It draws on the kind of story once commonplace in children’s literature, as the protagonists of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Goodnight Mister Tom pack their suitcases and flee London for the safety of the British countryside. Rita (Saoirse Ronan), in 1940, does the same for her boy George (newcomer Elliott Heffernan), who we discover harbours the same adventurousness as those literary protagonists. He leaps from a moving train and embarks on his odyssey through the city to find his way back into his mother’s arms.

There he’ll find charity and bigotry, air-raid wardens (Benjamin Clementine) and criminals (the always wonderful Kathy Burke and Stephen Graham). And, through the topography of his city, he will start to understand himself as a young Black boy, a quiet revelation communicated with such grace through Heffernan’s performance. He’s a stoic boy, in a way that seems to confront us as an audience, yet never severed from all the fear, loneliness, and mischief of a child in wartime. Ronan, too, shows the same dynamism, as she captures every shade of a mother’s love.

Much will be (and already has been) made about Blitz’s depiction of a diverse London, still a relative rarity on film. It’s historically accurate. Not much more needs to be said – yet the film’s corrective power doesn’t come solely from who McQueen chooses to depict, but how he and his cinematographer Yorick Le Saux choose to frame the city’s spaces.

Blitz is drawn to the small details. At one point, the camera travels deep into a bustling jazz club, based on the Cafe de Paris, only to take a detour into the kitchen, in silent acknowledgement of joy’s unseen labours. While the crowds shelter from bombs, unsure whether they’ll live to see the morning’s light, the camera looks curiously across to see a couple in the discreet but frenzied throes of love.

Across his four previous films, his TV anthology Small Axe, and his entire work as a visual artist, McQueen has repeatedly circled back to the idea of power. Yet it’s rarely presented as a simplistic, binary divide between oppressor and oppressed. Rather it’s an entire infrastructure, one powered by capitalism and monotonous except when touched by human fallibility. In Blitz, Hans Zimmer’s thunderous, relentless score transforms itself into the machine of war, the crunch of metal against metal, or the whistle-whir of death falling from the sky.

Here is a film with the moral clarity to challenge the populist narrative of the “Blitz spirit” and the idea that wartime solidarity was immediate and universal, while simultaneously celebrating the hope that rises out of community. Intolerance persists, while authority refuses to serve the needs of the people, who clamour for the city’s Underground stations to be opened up as bomb shelters. Beneath the streets, real-life figure Mickey Davies (Leigh Gill), oversees a shelter with its own free medical service, years before the founding of the NHS.

McQueen, who also wrote the film’s script, is acutely aware of the cinematic legacy behind him. It’s a period documented, honoured, and reinterpreted a hundred times on screen before. Yet it’s what he sees and how he sees it, as one of Britain’s most extraordinary filmmakers, that makes Blitz feel monumental.

Dir: Steve McQueen. Starring: Elliott Heffernan, Saoirse Ronan, Harris Dickinson, Benjamin Clementine, Kathy Burke, Paul Weller, Stephen Graham, Erin Kellyman, Leigh Gill. 12A, 120 mins.

‘Blitz’ is screening at the BFI London Film Festival and is released in selected cinemas on 1 November, before streaming on Apple TV+ from 22 November