Saoirse Ronan Suffers Through Nazi Horrors in ‘Blitz’

There’s terror in both cacophony and silence, and Blitz is most arresting when it exploits the interplay between the chaotic and the tranquil to suggest the seesawing insanity of the Nazis’ September 1940 bombing campaign against London.

Director Steve McQueen’s second straight World War II effort following his 262-minute 2023 documentary Occupied City, the formally accomplished film is an immersive descent into a hell of fear, death, and separation. Nonetheless, it’s also a narratively and emotionally disjointed journey, its fine lead performances, moving details, and racial commentary never cohering into an affecting spectacular.

(Blitz was the closing night selection of this year’s New York Film Festival. It hits theaters Nov. 1 ahead of its release on Apple TV+ Nov. 22.)

Rita (Saoirse Ronan) is a single mother who resides in Stepney, east London, with her piano-playing father Gerald (Paul Weller) and her 9-year-old son George (Elliott Heffernan), whose Blackness makes him and his Caucasian mom the routine recipient of racial epithets. To aid the wartime cause, Rita works in a munitions factory building bombs to be used against Hitler’s forces, which have turned her home life into a nightmare of constant air-raid sirens and frantic flights to shelters.

Still, those warnings and sanctuaries are insufficient to keep the populace safe, and the government has therefore decided to send children out of the city until the Blitz concludes. This is a shrewd strategy, and one that Rita agrees with, but George is far less happy about being relocated alone to rural parts unknown. At the moment of his departure, he callously tells his tormented mother that he hates her and boards the train, refusing to grant her a goodbye.

Newcomer Heffernan has an innate charisma, but George is a shallow vessel for ideas about resilience, regret, and strength. Rita is similarly underdeveloped; while she’s chosen out of all her coworkers to sing on a live BBC radio broadcast, and is fiercely devoted to her child, her inner life seems to consist of only generic heartache and longing. The luminous Ronan strives to infuse Rita with empathetic personality, and she’s never less than captivating. Still, there’s nothing to her heroine except a dedication to grinning and bearing this misery, which makes her a rather unengaging center of attention.

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No sooner has George taken a seat on the train than he’s subjected to intolerant jibes by pint-sized bullies, whom he triumphantly intimidates and then, echoing his grandfather, describes as “all mouth and no trousers.” George certainly isn’t short on resolve, and feeling bad about the way he treated his mother during their farewell—and uninterested in being apart from her—he leaps off the speeding vehicle.

Shortly thereafter, he hops a ride on another train and discovers that his car is inhabited by a trio of stowaway brothers. Together, the kids share George’s sandwich and climb up to the locomotive’s roof to hoot and holler as it blows its whistle. Such exhilaration, however, doesn’t last; upon disembarking, a horrible tragedy leaves George once again on his own, determined to avoid capture and forced evacuation.

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Blitz habitually segues between loud and quiet moments, and that back-and-forth dynamic is key to its jarring suspense. The film’s sonic (and tonal) transitions reflect a world in perilous upheaval, and they augment set pieces that swiftly devolve into madness, culminating with a subway catastrophe that appears out of nowhere. McQueen and Yorick Le Saux’s lovely visuals, though, can’t make up for strange narrative elisions and an overarching lack of structure to both its primary plot and multiple asides. Harris Dickinson’s Jack, for example, is a soldier with eyes for Rita, and yet he remains a superfluous background cipher with no actual purpose, except to faintly tease a future for Rita that never comes to pass.

Racism rears its ugly head at regular intervals, be it in a flashback to Rita and George’s father Marcus (CJ Beckford) at a jazz club, George’s encounter with an African-born soldier (Benjamin Clementine) who instills in him pride for his Blackness, or the boy being nastily shooed away from a bakery window by an unpleasant proprietor. However, any links between this bigotry and the (unseen) Nazis’ prejudices, or any relationship between such hate and the film’s portrait of solidarity as a bulwark against calamity, fails to materialize. These instances resonate as disconnected from the overriding plight of the main characters, and are too sketchy to elicit much shock or indignation.

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McQueen’s latest begins with firefighters furiously fighting to corral an out-of-control water hose that twists and screams in the air like an angry serpent, and their eventual success speaks to the story’s focus on the necessity of togetherness. The writer/director’s script, alas, is too scattered and thin to expand on that idea. Better are its casual, offhand touches—a foot bouncing along to a well-sung song; a wisp of hair blowing gently in the breeze; an enemy bomber gliding overhead, illuminated by nearby explosions; George kicking a rock down a crowded sidewalk—that convey much with minimal fanfare. Of particularly memorable note is a shot of a woman drawing single lines down a friend’s calves to simulate the appearance of stockings, which says more about Britons’ hardships, needs, and desires than most of their dialogue.

As George endeavors to return home and Rita works in a bomb shelter, Blitz provides both characters with surrogate replacements for each other. McQueen does little with this, and he does less with George’s brief conscription in a gang run by Albert (Stephen Graham) that’s looting smoldering houses and stealing jewelry off fresh corpses. There’s a welcome Dickensian quality to this interlude, but no sooner is it introduced than it’s discarded, with George seizing an opportunity to flee his captors, never to see or hear from them again. So fleeting is Graham’s participation that it’s unclear why it was included in the first place—or, conversely, why it wasn’t fleshed out to be more substantial, given that it’s the film’s most colorful passage.

Ronan’s magnetic presence and Blitz’s polish are enough to prevent it from ever becoming outright dull. For a film about this devastating chapter in British history, though, its dearth of explosiveness is a not-inconsiderable shortcoming.

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