Saoirse Ronan suffers from Nazi horrors in ‘Blitz’

Both cacophony and silence bring fear Blitz is most striking when it uses the interplay of chaos and calm to suggest the madness of the Nazi bombings of London in September 1940.

Director Steve McQueen’s second consecutive World War II effort following his 262-minute 2023 documentary Occupied citythe formally completed film is a riveting descent into a hell of fear, death and separation. Nevertheless, it is also a journey devoid of narrative and emotional connections, with excellent lead performances, moving details and racist comments that never quite gelled into a moving spectacle.

(Blitz was the closing selection of this year’s New York Film Festival. The film will hit theaters on November 1 before premiering on Apple TV+ on November 22.)

Rita (Saoirse Ronan) is a single mother living in Stepney with her piano-playing father Gerald (Paul Weller) and 9-year-old son George (Elliott Heffernan), whose blackness makes him and his white mother regular recipients racial epithets. To aid the war cause, Rita works in a munitions factory, building bombs to be used against Hitler’s forces, which have turned her metropolitan home into a nightmare of constant air raid sirens and frantic flights to shelters.

Still, these warnings and sanctuaries are insufficient to keep the population safe, so the government decided to send the children out of the city until the Blitz ends. It’s a smart strategy and one that Rita agrees with, but George is much less happy about being relocated on his own to an unknown rural area. As he departs, he callously tells his tormented mother that he hates her and then boards the train, refusing to say goodbye to her.

Newcomer Heffernan has natural charisma, but George is a shallow vessel for ideas about resilience, grief and strength. Rita is similarly underdeveloped; although she was chosen among all her collaborators to sing on a live BBC radio broadcast and is fiercely devoted to her child, her inner life seems to consist only of general heartache and longing. The radiant Ronan strives to imbue Rita with an empathetic personality, and she is always captivating. Yet her character has nothing more than a dedication to smiling and bearing this misfortune, which relegates her to a rather unengaging spotlight.

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As soon as George sits down on the train, he is subjected to intolerant taunts by the little rascals, whom he triumphantly intimidates, and then, repeating his grandfather’s words, describes him as “with a mouth and no pants.” George certainly has no shortage of determination, and feeling bad about the way he treated his mother during their goodbye – and not wanting to be away from her – he jumps out of the moving vehicle.

Shortly thereafter, he boards another train and discovers that three stowaway brothers are living in his car. The children share George’s sandwich and climb on top of the locomotive to hoot and holler as the locomotive blows its whistle. However, such joy does not last long; after disembarking, a terrible tragedy leaves George alone once again, determined to avoid capture and forced evacuation.

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Blitz it tends to shift between loud and quiet moments, and this back-and-forth dynamic is key to the jarring tension. The film’s sonic (and tonal) transitions reflect a world in dangerous upheaval and enhance a setting that quickly descends into madness, culminating in a subway disaster that appears out of nowhere. McQueen and Yorick Le Saux’s charming visuals, however, cannot compensate for the odd narrative lapses and general lack of structure in both the main plot and its numerous side aspects. Harris Dickinson’s Jack, for example, is a soldier who looks up to Rita and yet remains a dispensable background cipher who serves no real purpose in the proceedings other than to feebly foretell Rita’s future, which never comes.

Racism appears at regular intervals, whether in flashbacks to Rita and George’s father Marcus (CJ Beckford) at a jazz club, or George’s encounter with an African-born soldier (Benjamin Clementine) who instills in him pride in his blackness, or about a boy who was brutally pushed out of a bakery window by an unpleasant owner. Yet any connection between this bigotry and the (invisible) prejudices of the Nazis, or any connection between such hatred and the film’s portrayal of solidarity as a bulwark against misfortune, fails to materialize. These cases seem disconnected from the main characters’ overarching situation, not to mention too perfunctory to generate shock or outrage.

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McQueen’s latest film begins with firefighters furiously fighting to shut down an out-of-control water hose that is writhing and screaming in the air like an angry snake, and their ultimate success is a testament to the story’s focus on the need for togetherness. Unfortunately, the writer/director’s script is too scattered and thin to develop this idea. Better are his random, offhand touches – a foot bouncing to the rhythm of a well-sung song; a strand of hair blowing gently in the wind; an enemy bomber gliding overhead, illuminated by nearby explosions; George kicks a rock down the crowded sidewalk – it conveys a lot with minimal fanfare. Of particular note is a shot of a woman drawing single lines on her friend’s calves to simulate the appearance of stockings, which says more about the hardships, needs and desires of the British than most of their dialogue.

George tries to get home while Rita works in a bomb shelter. Blitz he provides both characters with replacement replacements for himself. McQueen does little with this, and does less with George’s brief conscription into a gang led by Albert (Stephen Graham), who ransack smoldering homes and steal jewelry from fresh corpses. This interruption has a Dickensian quality to it, but as soon as it is introduced it is discarded and George takes the opportunity to escape from his captors, never to be seen or heard from again. Graham’s involvement is so fleeting that it’s unclear why he was included at all or, conversely, why he wasn’t fleshed out for more substance, given that it’s the most colorful part of the film.

The magnetic presence of Ronan and Blitzare enough to prevent complete matting. However, for a film about this devastating chapter of English history, the lack of explosiveness is quite a shortcoming.

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