Blitz (now streaming on Apple TV+) grabs hold of you in the opening seconds and never lets go. This is no surprise – it’s a Steve McQueen film, after all. The real surprise may be how McQueen, who challenged us so mightily with Shame, Oscar winner 12 Years a Slave and the incomparable Small Axe anthology series, helmed a conventional-at-least-for-him World War II adventure drama. Of course, it’s as virtuoso and to-the-hilt as any World War II adventure drama you’re likely to see, because that’s his M.O. Old pro Saoirse Ronan and gifted newcomer Elliott Heffernan anchor this thoroughly absorbing story, playing a mother and son separated during “the Blitz,” when the Nazis conducted regular bombing raids on London in 1940. And no, I wasn’t exaggerating when I said it never lets go – it’s been several hours since I watched it, and it’s still there, and I expect it to still be there for many days hence.
BLITZ: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: The firehose – it’s a symbol. As soon as the valve is opened, it leaps from the firefighter’s hands, knocks him out cold and writhes like an angry, spitting serpent. Blocks of London are engulfed in flame. Members of the fire brigade wrestle and pin down the hose and resume what sure seems like a feeble attempt to staunch the endless fires of Hell. Utterly chaotic, the scene seems hopeless, but you have to fight. You have to. The moment concludes with a burst of water that evolves into abstract imagery on the screen and we flash back a couple of days: Rita (Ronan) hustles her son George (Heffernan), who’s about eight or nine I’d estimate, and her aging father Gerald (Paul Weller) to a bomb shelter. Air-raid sirens blare. An angry, panicky crowd urges police to let them into the underground tube station. The gates are locked. It’s against the law to open it. But other shelters are full. A bomb bursts nearby and the crowd ducks and shrieks and the guards finally coalesce. Desperate times.
They survive the night and the next day Rita puts George on a train full of children being taken to safer environs in the country. Neither wants to be separated from the other, but – desperate times. She gives him a necklace to put around his neck. It was his father’s. He never knew the guy. His story will eventually be told, but until then, Rita is the mother of a boy the other kids call a “Black bastard” or touch his hair like he’s a curiosity at a petting zoo. He’ll have to deal with that type of shit on his own for now. He lashes out at Rita: “I hate you,” he says, then runs off, boards the train and won’t acknowledge his weeping mother as she pounds on the window. Pain. It can be exponential.
Rita keeps her wits about her, though. She’s good at that. She operates a drill press in a factory, building bombs. The BBC visits the facility that day to broadcast a concert that includes a military brass band and a song sung by Rita. Her voice is marvelous, but a bit wobbly today. Understandable. Just as she finishes, a co-worker friend runs up on the stage and grabs the microphone and shouts to all the radio listeners out there, “We need shelters! Open up the underground!” Elsewhere, a parallel narrative occurs as George faces down two bullies on the train who are more interested in insulting him than taking up his offer to fight. He then opens the train car door and jumps out and begins hoofing it back toward home until a train going in that direction arrives and he hops that. He’s not alone in there. Three other boys, brothers, are trying to get to London too. They warn him, if he gets caught, they’ll put him right back on the train headed to the countryside.
Rita heads to the pub with a couple of girl friends but her heart isn’t into it so she drops by a shelter to volunteer. She comforts a sad little girl who lost her mother in an air raid. “Want a snuggle?” Rita asks, then embraces the child. Meanwhile, George eludes cops and soldiers and other authority figures and has himself a little adventure. He gets back to London, but it’s a big city. Huge. Lost, he wanders into a museum and stares at exhibits depicting Black folk as indentured students and then a soldier’s hand lands on his shoulder. The man is Ife (Benjamin Clementine). His face is kind, his touch is safe. He promises to get George home. Ife says he’s from Ghana. George says he’s not Black, but after Ife earns his trust, he says simply, “Ife? I am Black.” George almost smiles in this moment. He doesn’t smile much because he doesn’t have much to smile about these days. We will see him smile eventually, but it won’t be real, and your heart might just shatter.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: I thought of ambitious war sagas like Atonement or 1917, with bits of Belfast or The Pianist or Empire of the Sun or Hope and Glory.
Performance Worth Watching: Heffernan is a find. He and Ronan equally share the hefty emotional weight of this story.
Memorable Dialogue: George’s kind grandad reminds him what bullies are: “All mouth and no trousers.” “All mouth and no trousers,” George repeats back.
Sex and Skin: A brief, nongraphic scene of a man and a woman commingling on a subway track.
Our Take: Blitz is almost a fable. It’s a story about an industrious young boy working his way through one extraordinary circumstance after another to get back home to his mother, and it plays out like an adventure saga you read in school once you graduated to chapter books. A few things separate the film from a children’s story, though: It chronicles many upsetting, but never graphic, instances of George losing his innocence and reaching a deeper understanding of the adult world around him. It also sticks with a deeply conflicted Rita as she wrestles with the decision she made, which is logically the right decision but emotionally absolutely the wrong decision.
Nor does the film shy away from the tragedy of racism. McQueen stresses moments where people are forced together by the sheer mechanics of war, but still squabble with each other over the petty differences of nationality or skin color. There are bad actors in the sky above, dropping bombs from planes, and bad actors on the ground, dodging those bombs and holding onto prejudice as if it’s a lifeline back to peaceful society. And we come to a raw and simple, but nonetheless profound, realization that the roots of World War II are more about assertions of racial superiority than anything else. Microcosm, macrocosm.
McQueen directs the action sequences – of which there are many – and moments of human drama with equal precision and an eye for detail. His camera roams and tracks to build tension during a musical sequence set in a live music club, and it’s as sexually charged as Lovers Rock, as suspenseful as Casablanca and, eventually, as horrifying as Night of the Living Dead. If he built the story around similarly elaborate set pieces – the opening firefighting sequence, George’s various escapes, a third-act bombing raid playing out in harrowing fashion in subway tunnels – I wouldn’t be surprised. He deploys searing imagery that’s as artistic as it is frightening. Blitz is a survival story, and I hesitate to call it a “tale,” although it has elements of the feasibly fantastic. It’s layered with harsh social realities and unforgiving pragmatism. It’s beautiful and ugly and finds a way to balance optimism and pessimism in a credible, heartbreaking manner. Some will hold it to an elevated standard because it’s a film by Steve McQueen, who’s one of the most gifted directors of our time, but we needn’t be silly and razor-slice hairs to assess his work. Tremendous filmmaking is tremendous filmmaking, period.
Our Call: Blitz is one of 2024’s best films. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
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