Henry O'Brien
If anything can define the last decade-plus of director Steve McQueen, it’s his ability to create rich story worlds that are as full of life as they are pain and sorrow. A historical drama where a slave is forced through plantations, encountering differing oppressors. A Chicago heist film that includes themes such as sexism, police brutality and interracial marriage. A five-film series depicting the wide-ranging stories of West Indian immigrants in London.
McQueen revels in capturing the processes and dichotomies that accompany his narratives. So when it comes to portraying London during the German bombing attack that gives the film its name, the British director was clearly going to be interested in showing as many perspectives as he could. But this filmmaking aspect that worked well in McQueen’s previous films is sorely lacking in Blitz, his 2024 work that premiered at the BFI London Film Festival and played at the New York Film Festival. The film, which follows rebellious young boy George’s (Elliott Heffernan) trek around war-torn London and his mother Rita’s (Saoirse Ronan) quest to find him, features plenty of hidden corners and stories around the city. While McQueen makes the cinematic experience harrowing and distinct to him alone, the characters that inhabit these corners feel undeveloped and lack the complexity that can be found in 12 Years A Slave, Widows, or Small Axe.
McQueen uses the World War II setting as the groundwork for how characters react in these dire circumstances. He consistently makes the feeling of dread seep in from the moment the film begins, where the volume increases as firefighters are trying to quell the flames from a bombed building. With a screeching sound design and a Hans Zimmer score that emphasizes a looming threat, the viewers know that bombs could drop anytime and that death could be around the corner. McQueen aptly shows the bombs just falling on London, but never actually displaying the moment of impact, just the before and after. One of the most powerful scenes in the film comes at a dance club where McQueen builds a grim anticipation for the bombs to be dropped. However, McQueen never wants to depict sheer brutality; instead, he lets the viewer imagine the last moments of life for these British partygoers.
A constant fear permeates the film and the characters’ head spaces, especially Rita, who is at first insistent on keeping George by her side instead of letting him go to the countryside like most children. Once she decides to send him away, George jumps off the countryside-bound train to make his way back to London.
George spends most of the film’s runtime in his home city, but the sheer size and scope of London allows his encounters to feel like a journey akin to Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun. He meets a group of three young brothers who are trying to escape life in the countryside, a hopeful and proud Nigerian-born air-raid warden (Benjamin Clementine) and an opportunistic gangster (Stephen Graham) who sees the death and destruction around the city as a financial opportunity.
The story structure of Blitz allows McQueen to make London feel like any major city in the world: complex and varied. The differing pedals of the damaged flower of London are a clear strength of McQueen. He knows in a city or in a community, like in his Best Picture Winner, heist thriller and miniseries, there will always be perspectives that combat with one another. While there is an attempt by McQueen to follow his narrative and stylistic tendencies, Blitz feels woefully simple.
The air-raid warden, Ife (Benjamin Clementine), helps George embrace his own identity. As he brings the young boy to a shelter, he settles a heated argument between white and brown Londoners. Ife’s optimism and pride feel like the embodiment of the phrase “keep calm and carry on.” And if there is a consistent throughline in all of George’s encounters, it’s how these supporting characters go about interpreting this phrase. But this is half-baked, as characters are no more than straightforward stand-ins for these ideas that don’t contribute to a larger conversation about identity and how the Blitz has impacted these characters.
The concurrent storyline in the film comes through Rita’s attempt to find her son as she works at a munitions factory. Similar to George’s story, Blitz’s B story features plenty of McQueen-esque sequences, including detailing the process of Rita’s factory job and how she helps create the weapons that will go to fight the Axis powers.
McQueen’s interest in depicting a process is evident in his Small Axe film Lovers Rock, where he painstakingly shows women preparing yellow curry goat. This sequence offered a glimpse into a culture never really depicted on screen, while Blitz’s depiction of process takes on more of an anonymous feeling.
Additionally, there isn’t much more of a deeper examination of Rita’s life, particularly when it comes to her lovelife, only shown in brief flashbacks that offer backstory, or her passions like singing. Ronan, to her credit, brings a gravitas required for the role and fundamentally understands how to portray a character stuck in less-than-ideal circumstances in works such as Lady Bird or Little Women. There is also a relationship between Rita and a firefighter named Jack (Harris Dickinson), but this little love story never goes anywhere and takes the viewer out of the rush of Rita trying to find her son.
Even as McQueen layers Blitz with narrative choices like having a happy, yet uncertain ending, none of them have the same power as they have had in his previous works. So while this could be considered one of the director’s weaker works, the film remains an intense, if conventionally hollow work.
