Heart-hammering depiction of war’s horror
Dunkirk 12A cert, 106 min
★★★★★
Dir Christopher Nolan Starring
Fionn Whitehead, Aneurin Barnard, Harry Styles, Mark Rylance, Tom Glynn-carney, Barry Keoghan, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, Jack Lowden, James D’arcy, Kenneth Branagh
Christopher Nolan’s astonishing new film, a retelling of the Allied evacuation of occupied France in 1940, is a work of heart-hammering intensity and grandeur that demands to be seen on the biggest screen within reach. But its spectacle doesn’t stop at just the recreations of Second World War combat.
Like all great war films, it’s every bit as transfixing up close: at the wheels of the civilian boats scudding across the Channel, inside the cockpits of the fighter planes tearing overhead, and most of all on the beach, with
those uniformed boys barely out of their teens, wrestling with the strange notion of defeat-with-honour even as they fight for their lives.
In a creamily intuitive structural device, the land, sea and air strands of the story unspool simultaneously, even though each one spans a different period of time. It’s one week for Fionn Whitehead’s Tommy and the other troops huddled on the beach, one day for the civilian sailors, like Mark Rylance’s Mr Dawson, sailing from the English coast to Dunkirk, and one hour for Tom Hardy and Jack Lowden’s Spitfire pilots, thinning out the Messerschmitts that dart and dive overhead like buzzards scenting blood.
Dunkirk is every inch a British film, with no detectable concessions to the international market. There isn’t, for instance, the commercially fortunate presence of an American face among the cast, which includes Cillian Murphy and Kenneth Branagh – although there is a bright and unexpectedly not-atall-jarring performance from Harry Styles, formerly of the boy band One Direction, as one of the young soldiers on the beach.
Amid the heroism and struggle for survival, Dunkirk’s dialogue is sparse and functional: what matters above all else is the actors’ visceral engagement with whatever seemingly insurmountable task is facing them. Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan and Terrence Malick’s The
Thin Red Line rewrote the rules of engagement between cinema and war, and changed the way many of us think about both. Dunkirk is as unlike those films as they are each other, but all three fall into a tradition of capturing real, enormous horrors at intimate quarters. That task takes a filmmaker at the peak of their powers. This is the work of one.