Saoirse Ronan and Elliott Heffernan in Steve McQueen's Blitz. Photo / Apple TV+
Saoirse Ronan and Elliott Heffernan in Steve McQueen's Blitz. Photo / Apple TV+
London Film Festival’s opener, which stars Saoirse Ronan and a brilliant young newcomer, is thrilling, moving and morally provoking, says the Telegraph’s chief film critic Robbie Collin, who gave Steve McQueen’s new movie five stars.
Steve McQueen’s sensational new film might be set in London as it was seven decades after Charles Dickens’ death, but the city on screen has seldom felt deeper in the great novelist’s debt.
Blitz, which opened the 68th London Film Festival this evening, presents a teeming snapshot of the city at a pivotal point in time. Its Oliver Twist is George Ashby (Elliott Heffernan), a 9-year-old evacuee, whose mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan) tearfully sends him off from Paddington Station with a cardboard tag around his neck.
The year is 1940, and with the Luftwaffe raining bombs on the industrialised East End by night, its cosy brick-built terraces are no longer safe. But for George, the countryside also holds little appeal, largely because Rita won’t be there. So an hour into the trip, he hops off the train and vows to make his way back.
The journey that follows is a thrilling, moving, morally provoking odyssey through Britain at war, with a flock of vividly sketched supporting characters that buffet George from one adventure to the next. Few stick around for long, but their often fleeting screen time belies the impact each one leaves on both the plot and George himself. The composer Benjamin Clementine gives a beautifully tender performance as an air raid warden of Nigerian descent who offers George fatherly support during a troubling night. Leigh Gill, of the Joker films, gives a rousing turn as the real-life Jewish public health campaigner Mickey Davis. And Stephen Graham and Kathy Burke are so grottily magnificent as a pair of ghoulish cutpurses, even the creator of Fagin himself might have doffed his cap.
Collectively, we see a country sussing out the next chapter in its story: Britain is ready to define itself in opposition to the Nazi threat, but is fine-tuning the specifics on the hoof. Crucially, George is mixed race – his Grenadian father was deported before his birth – and the question of where he might fit into the group portrait is one which keeps nudging its way to the front of his mind.
Elliot Heffernan, 11-year-old upcoming star, plays Ronan's 9-year-old son in the film. Photo / Getty Images
Heffernan, an 11-year-old newcomer, gives a wonderful performance that’s by turns clear and enigmatic: though George doesn’t yet fully understand these existential questions, we feel that he feels their weight. In a memorable night-time sequence, the lad finds himself in a deluxe West End arcade, where sweetmeats are arrayed in shop windows before paintings of sugar and cocoa plantations.
Two gormless mannequins of planters catch his eye. Are they what he is, or how he’s viewed? But McQueen’s script is far too smart to push a line. Like his Small Axe anthology series, it simply nods towards under-noticed parts of the picture and says: this, too, is in the mix.
Harris Dickinson, Steve McQueen, Saoirse Ronan, Elliott Heffernan and Paul Weller at the world premiere of Blitz in London. Photo / Getty Images
And McQueen’s film is big-picture British cinema, of a scale and depth which hasn’t been seen since Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk. Both London and the countryside are shot with a classical elegance that calls to mind David Lean, while the sequences portraying the bombings themselves flare with panic and horror.
Among its many unshakeable images is a close-up on George’s sleeping face as he shelters in London Bridge underground station, which gently fades to a long-range, top-down view of the city burning above. In these fires, Blitz suggests, was a nation reforged.
Blitz will be available to watch in New Zealand in November.
