NYFF Review: ‘Blitz’ Is an Uplifting Tribute To the Human Spirit Amongst Adversity

In Blitz, Steve McQueen reinvents war-time-survival cinema by channeling past films —49th Parallel, among other Powell/Pressburger work, The Railway Children, Empire of the Sun, Oliver!, among other Dickensian fare, and even Les Misérables, to name but a few—and then subverts the sub-genre by refocusing the narrative onto people whose war-time struggles are rarely, if ever, told. He also dives into the fraught misogynist, racist, classist tensions among the British people during the second war. Contrary to popular film portraits, the Brits were anything but united.

The simple story is set against the devastating 1940s London blitzkrieg by Nazi Germany, which decimated the city. Single-mom Rita (Saoirse Ronan) makes the impossible decision to send her 9-year-old bi-racial son, George (outstanding newbie Elliott Heffernan) to the English countryside via a government program to safeguard children. George is not happy about this and decides to jump out of the train and journey home—if he can find it. George’s intense odyssey is crosscut with Rita’s travails while the Luftwaffe bombings continue to wreak havoc on her homeland.

McQueen’s harsh and destructive images of the bombings and aftermath are visually stunning as is a wildly disturbing sequence involving a cruel Fagin-like character (Stephen Graham) and his band of looters plundering a ballroom full of corpses, just another inhumane sequence that puts George in peril. Kudos to his production designer, Adam Stockhausen, and DP Yorick Le Saux.

The film’s fairly conventional opening didn’t involve me that much but somewhere in that first hour I was gripped completely right through the closing credits.

The ensemble is uniformly excellent with Benjamin Clémentine and Harris Dickinson especially terrific in small but key roles.

Ronan, who does powerhouse lead work in The Outrun, is quite compelling here. She makes the most of each frame she’s in, etching an unforgettable portrait of a fearful and loving mother but also a defiant citizen of the world. A Supporting nomination would be most deserved.

While I appreciated the bleak moments, Blitz is ultimately uplifting. The film is a tribute to a people, not necessarily unified culturally or politically, who shared a common desire to survive, save their children, and defeat totalitarianism.

Blitz opens in select theaters on November 1.