Blitz.

Steve McQueen’s Blitz is the Oscar-winning director’s first feature film since the underrated 2018 film Widows, which, among other things, introduced some filmgoers to the scene-stealing actress Cynthia Erivo. While McQueen has a knack for handling tough subject matter and building tremendous tension in his films, Blitz suffers from an unusually stolid approach, without strong characters to anchor it or to balance out some stilted dialogue. (It’s streaming on Apple TV+, which you can also get through Amazon.)

The main story arc of Blitz follows George (Elliot Heffernan), the young son of single mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan), at the beginning of the bombing of London in World War II. Rita chooses to evacuate him, but George decides to jump off the train to the countryside and try to make his way back home. The film then drops him in one situation after another to demonstrate, Zelig-like, various actual events from the war (like the flooding of Balham Tube station) or to allow the film to make some social commentary (especially since George’s father was Black). It’s almost picaresque in style, with far fewer comic elements, as George goes from peril to peril, while the film occasionally flashes back in time or shifts to show us Rita working in a factory or, too late in the film, learning that he’s gone missing.

The plot of Blitz is packed, which makes it so hard to fathom how it could feel so little urgency. There are individual scenes where George and/or others are in mortal danger, but he’s obviously going to make it out of each one of these jams, and the film doesn’t really invest enough time in George’s character to make something more interesting out of these scenes – such as wondering how he’ll figure out how to get away from a kidnapper. (The answer to that is also not very interesting.)

The whole movie seems to happen at arm’s length – we don’t get to know any characters very well, not George, not Rita, not her father (Paul Weller, better known as the leader of The am), not anyone. There’s a big scene in a restaurant with a band playing, with a couple of Black singers and an all-white audience; we don’t know any of these people and they’re not named, so when a bomb hits and kills them all, it feels like documentation, not an actual loss. It’s all the worse because this is based closely on another actual event: The Café de Paris was a major theatre club in London that was bombed in 1941, killing 34 people (but not everyone), including the bandleader Ken “Snakehips” Johnson. In Blitz, it’s used as a prop, as George ends up helping loot the corpses, not as a commemoration of the loss of lives.

This pattern of fictionalizing a series of real yet disconnected events from the Blitz hits a low with the character Ife (Benjamin Clementine), a Yoruba ARP Warden who finds and befriends George. Based on Ita Ekpenyon, a real Nigerian man who served as an ARP Warden because at 46 he was too old to fight, Ife delivers a speech in a shelter when a white couple shows their prejudice against an Indian family. This is loosely based on something Ekpenyon did, but in the film, it is so abrupt that it feels false – we have no reason to think Ife is this strong a person, and he disappears from the film soon afterwards, leaving the impression that he was there just to deliver those few lines. (The dialogue here is so awkward that I thought the whole thing must be fictional, only to learn after watching the film that it was based on actual events.)

Ronan is a decorated actress for good reason, and might even get some award nominations this year for her role in The Outrun, but she’s wasted here on a character who doesn’t have a whole lot of definition to her. Heffernan is the only actor who gets much to work with, and to his credit, he’s quite credible, never simpering or pathetic, and sometimes even convincing you he’s a little snot who should be sent to bed without his pudding. There are a few cameos here beyond Weller – Stephen Graham shows up as a Faginesque leader of a group of looters – but no one has enough screen time to do much beyond mug for the camera.

If I sound disappointed, well, yeah, I was. I loved Widows, and having visited the fantastic Churchill War Rooms in London in 2022, I was very interested in the film’s subject and time period. Unfortunately, this is a disjointed effort that is salvaged a little because it’s shot so well and because Heffernan is pretty compelling as the one consistent presence. I’ve found at least four reviews (the NY Times, the BBC, the NY Post, and the Harvard Crimson) that referred to the movie as “Dickensian” or otherwise said it could be compared to Dickens, but I don’t think that’s a compliment. That style of novel, where a character bounces from adventure to misadventure and meets a cast of eccentrics along the way, isn’t well suited to serious material. Grafting a bunch of deadly events on to it means that the audience never has time to process what’s happened, and never builds any emotional connection to or investment in the people on screen. McQueen is capable of much better.